Criticism of extremist rhetoric and the numerous terror plots that have emanatedfrom Falls Church, Va.'s Dar al-Hijrah Islamic center equals "ignorantly paintingall Muslims with the same brush" and "dividing the country using fear and hate," aVirginia state legislator said.

"For Fox News to smear an important community institution by ignorantly painting allMuslims with the same brush is reprehensible," Lopez wrote on his Facebook page andin a post on the Daily Kos. "At its core, this is a rightwing media attack on thefaith and religious freedom of hard-working patriotic Americans."

Lopez created a petition attacking the "right-wing smears of the Dar al-HijrahIslamic Center" in response to the criticisms from Fox and others. He did notrespond to a request for comment from the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

The resolution, which passed the Virginia General Assembly March 3, praised themosque for "promot[ing] cooperation, tolerance and mutual understanding amongdifferent faiths."

Dar al-Hijrah may engage in inter-faith outreach. But it also has a checkeredhistory in its preaching, in addition to the radical people it has attracted and theterrorists who prayed there.

Lopez also downplayed the mosque's established connections with terrorism andextremist rhetoric by playing up the charitable activities and interfaith activitiesit engages in under the rubric of dawah (Muslim evangelism).

"In 2013, the members of the center provided more than $80,000 in assistance tocommunity members struggling to pay their rent, and served 200 families from allfaith backgrounds each week through their weekly food bank," Lopez wrote on hisFacebook page.

That's lovely, but it doesn't erase the mosque's history and law enforcementassessments of it. U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports obtained by the IPThave noted that the mosque "has been under numerous investigations for financing and[providing] aid and comfort to bad orgs and members" and have called it a "front forHamas operatives in U.S."

Among those bad members, Awlaki served as an imam at Dar al-Hijrah before leavingthe United States. Two 9/11 hijackers attended services there, as did Fort Hoodshooter Nidal Hasan and terrorist financier Abdurrahman Alamoudi.

The Washington Post noted in 2011 that "almost no other mosque in the country hasbeen linked to so many cases of alleged terrorism."

Meanwhile, radical material continues to be peddled by the mosque.

Books the Investigative Project on Terrorism bought during a Dar al-Hijrah's booksale last fall included texts sanctioning hatred and violent jihad againstnon-Muslims. These books raise questions about the mosque's commitment to toleranceand understanding.

· Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi's book The Desired Muslim Generation, opines that"Palestine will ultimately be freed and the Jews conquered. The whole universe willbe on their side; even trees and rocks will somehow support them by saying: 'OMuslim O Abdullah [slave of Allâh (I)] Here is a Jew hidden behind me come and killhim.'"

Qaradawi writes that Muslims who wage violent jihad believe "their religion is soprecious to them that their worldly life has become despicable."

"They fight in Allah's cause, so they kill [others] and are killed," Qaradawiwrites, citing Surah 9:111 of the Quran.

· The Last Apocalypse, An Islamic Perspective, written by A.R. Kelani, speculatesthat the dajjal -- Islam's Antichrist -- will be a Jew and that "Allah will destroyall religions except Islam."

· In Pursuit of Allah's Pleasure , another book purchased at Dar al-Hijrah's sale,slams imams who teach that all religions are equal and says that following "iman" --essentially the Golden Rule -- is the only thing that is required.

"We need to wage Jihad, for without it the flag of Islam will never he raised andthe forces of disbelief will continue to dominate our lives. Jihad is the [m]eans bywhich we can establish the Caliphate after having removed the disbelieving rulerswho have replaced the law of Allah by man-made laws," In Pursuit of Allah's Pleasuresays.

· The Ideal Muslim Society, by Dr. Muhammad Ali Hashimi, talks about diverting zakatfunds, ordinarily used as charity to help the poor, to fund jihad.

"The most important of these (other uses for zakat) is jihad for the sake of Allahbecause the Muslim ummah should focus on conveying its message to the world,"Hashimi writes.

Radical ideas also come from mosque leadership.

The mosque's chief imam, Shaker Elsayed, has repeatedly endorsed violent jihad. Justlast year, he spoke at a Northern Virginia high school where he preached that Muslimmen would be last in line except if it was for "arms for jihad."

"Are we afraid because they may call us terrorists?" Elsayed asked. "You are aterrorist because you are a Muslim," Elsayed said. "Well give them a run for theirmoney. Make it worth it. Make this title worth it, and be good a Muslim.

"Be a good Muslim who fights back when there is an attack on yourself, on yourcommunity, your society, your nation, your religion, your dignity, your honor, yourwomen, your children or your neighbors."

This was not the first time Elsayed has endorsed terrorism. In a December 2002speech, he took issue with the labels "suicide bombers, homicide bombers, ormurderers, or killers."

"To decide that this man is a martyr or not a martyr, it is a pure religiousmatter," Elsayed said. "Nobody who is not Muslim has any right to decide for us, wethe Muslims, whose is a martyr or another. We as Muslims will decide that. It isin-house business."

Esam Omeish, a former Dar al-Hijrah board member who remains an occasional preacherat the mosque, similarly endorsed violent jihad in an October 2000 speech. In it, hecongratulated Palestinian terrorists for "giving up their lives for the sake ofAllah and al-Aqsa." In another speech two months later, he praised Palestinians forknowing "that the jihad way is the way to liberate your land."

He was the president of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Muslim American Society (MAS).Dar al-Hijrah belongs to MAS, and MAS has operations on the mosque's property.Omeish reportedly hired al-Awlaki to be the mosque's imam.

Dar al-Hijrah's rogue's gallery also includes Abdelhaleem Ashqar, a Hamas operativewho is serving an 11-year sentence for obstructing a federal terrorism investigationinto the terrorist group's activities. Ashqar, a former mosque board member, helpedorganize a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia with other Hamas operatives.

In November, the mosque hosted Hassan Hachimi, the head of the Syrian MuslimBrotherhood's political bureau. While there, Hachimi condemned the United States forclassifying al-Qaida's Syrian affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra as a terrorist group.

Preaching hatred and intolerance of non-Muslims has been a longstanding problem atDar al-Hijrah.

For example, a Nov. 12, 2004 sermon by Imam Johari Abdul Malik promised that Islamwould become the "first religion in America" and that it would be better to "be aMuslim under these conditions than a kaffir (unbeliever) under any conditions."

Sheik Mohammed al-Hanooti, another Dar al-Hijrah imam, also showcased the mosque'scommitment to tolerance in a December 18, 1998 where he said, "Just like Allahpromises us, he will stand in his promise and the curse of Allah will become true onthe Jews. The curse of Allah will become true on the Americans and the tyrannies."

There are plenty of mosques in Virginia that engage in interfaith dialogue withoutsermons and literature promoting jihad and which have not served as magnets forterrorists and their supporters. Pointing out Dar al-Hijrah's full history isneither bigoted nor ignorant.

Demanding that people not point out that documented history, on the other hand,appears to be a naked play for political support by a legislator with biggerambitions than the General Assembly in Richmond.

During the election for Mayor in NYC, I warned of de Blasio’s pro-terror allegiances. I submitted the ad (below) to run on NYC subway platforms.New York enemedia didn’t like it — read this. A de Blasio spokeswoman called my ad “hateful and offensive.” What exactly is hateful and offensive? He did exactly as I predicted. He has disbanded the NYPD counter-terror program and vowed to go after the “real bad guys.”

Who dat, Herr Wilhelm?

Check out the first bullet of our ad: "He will endanger New Yorkers by disbanding anti-terror surveillance units."

Sleep fitfully, dear New Yorkers. And don’t worry your pretty little heads that NYC is the number one target for jihadists here and across the world.

The NYPD has abandoned its controversial and secretive surveillance program that sent plainclothes police officers into Muslim neighborhoods for the purposes of gathering information on possible terrorist plots, officials said.Marking a dramatic change of course for the department, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton agreed to disband the largely inactive Demographics Unit, which was started in 2003 in response to the 9/11 terror attacks.The unit was intended to root out threats by identifying pockets of Islamic radicalization and locations where potential terrorists might gather.The covert program sent plainclothes officers into restaurants, mosques and just about anywhere else Muslims gathered, to eavesdrop on people’s conversations and gauge people’s feeling toward the United States.The unit worked in secret until 2011, when the Associated Press published an expose chronicling the NYPD’s exploits in Muslim neighborhoods, causing a rift between the department and minority communities.“Our administration has promised the people of New York a police force that keeps our city safe, but that is also respectful and fair,” Mayor de Blasio said in a statement.“This reform is a critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities they serve, so that our cops and our citizens can help one another go after the real bad guys.”

In his Easter message last Saturday, Barack Obama asserted that the “common thread of humanity that connects us all – not just Christians and Jews, but Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs – is our shared commitment to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.”

Even though he was registered as a Muslim in primary school in Indonesia and recounts in his first autobiography that he got in trouble there for making faces in Qur’an class, Obama apparently recalls little of the contents of the Qur’an. For if he did, he would know that it tells Muslims “take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors” (5:51), calls them “the most vile of created beings” (98:6), and calls the patriarch Abraham an “excellent example” for telling his unbelieving relatives: “There has arisen between us and you enmity and hatred forever unless you believe in Allah and Him alone” (60:4). It also says: “Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are merciful to one another, and harsh to the unbelievers” (48:29).

Enjoining mercy to those who share one’s religious beliefs and harshness to those who do not is hardly tantamount to loving one’s neighbor as oneself, and this sharp dichotomy between believers and unbelievers is not just found in some random Qur’an passages to which no one pays attention. It runs all through Islamic scripture, doctrine and law. It is even an accepted principle in Islam that the life of a non-Muslim is worth less than that of a Muslim: a manual of Islamic law certified by Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar university (from which Obama addressed the Islamic world in June 2009) as “conforming to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community” declares: “The indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half the indemnity paid for a man. The indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third the indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid for a Zoroastrian is one-fifteenth that of a Muslim.” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o4.9)

The Iranian Sheikh Sultanhussein Tabandeh echoed and amplified that point in his Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Since Islam regards non-Muslims as on a lower level of belief and conviction, if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim — then his punishment must not be the retaliatory death, since the faith and conviction he possesses is loftier than that of the man slain…Islam and its peoples must be above the infidels, and never permit non-Muslims to acquire lordship over them.”

While this devaluing of the non-Muslim’s life is based on teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah, there is nothing in Islam that teaches that non-Muslims should be accorded the same rights and dignity as Muslims in an Islamic state.

There is no indication that Obama knows about such Islamic teachings, but even if he did, it is unlikely that he would say anything, since, after all, he has said that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” – and in Islamic law, “slander” is not telling a falsehood about someone, but telling a truth about someone that he does not want known. And after over five years of Obama’s presidency, it is abundantly clear that one thing he does not want Americans to know is that there are texts and teachings of Islam that Islamic jihadists use to justify violence and supremacism, and that jihadis are still trying to murder Americans in accord with those teachings.

As I detail in my book Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In, this willful ignorance at the highest levels has endangered Americans more than once, making for murderous attacks that could have and should have been prevented. The most notorious of these are the Boston Marathon bombing and the Fort Hood massacre.

Two years before the Boston bombing, Russian intelligence agents told the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a “follower of radical Islam” who had tried to join “underground groups” in Dagestan. That is tantamount to saying that Tsarnaev was an Islamic jihadist, which should have been enough for the FBI to keep him under constant or at least regular surveillance. It did not – and not coincidentally, right around the time the Russians gave the feds this information, the Obama administration (under pressure from Muslim groups with links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood) mandated the scrubbing of counter-terror training materials of all mention of Islam and jihad (and the dismissal of FBI trainers who spoke about the motives and goals of jihad terrorists, including me). Agents who still knew how to evaluate the Russian intel were probably afraid that to do so, in the prevailing politically correct climate, would have been career suicide.

In the same way, Fort Hood jihad murderer Nidal Malik Hasan rose through Army ranks even as he justified suicide bombing and spouted hatred for America, and he did so with extraordinarily positive recommendations. In an evaluation dated March 13, 2009, just short of eight months before his jihad attack, Hasan’s superiors said that he should be put into a position “that allows others to learn from his perspectives” and declared that his “unique insights into the dimensions of Islam” and his “moral reasoning” could be of “great potential interest and strategic importance to the U.S. Army.”

And indeed, Hasan’s insights into Islam are of great strategic importance to the U.S. Army, but not in a way that Army brass is inclined to accept or admit. To do so would harm “diversity” in the military. And that, apparently, is more important than making sure that there isn’t another jihad massacre.

A large-scale change in the political and media culture is vitally necessary for the U.S. to deal realistically with the jihad threat. But it is not on the horizon. Instead, the willful ignorance and wishful thinking that Obama manifested yet again in his Easter message rule the day. And that means only that there will be more jihad massacres.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

And true to form, this entire article doesn’t mention CAIR’s ties to Hamas, or its fascist pattern of trying to get any and every speaker canceled if he or she dares to speak the truth about jihad and Islamic terror. Shelby Webb doesn’t see fit to mention, and may not even know, that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Its California chapter distributed the poster above telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI. CAIR has opposed every anti-terror measure that has ever been proposed or implemented.

Note also their use of the term “extremist,” which is the same word they use of jihad terrorists — thus equating the resistance to jihad terror with jihad terror itself, a particularly repulsive exercise in moral equivalence that the mainstream media has accepted with alacrity.

A Florida Islamic group is accusing some Republican Party lawmakers and local party organizations of fostering anti-Muslim sentiment.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, sent letters to almost every Republican Club or party extension in the state, asking the groups to stop bringing speakers who espouse anti-Islamic views. The letter said it represented the interests of more than 150,000 registered Florida Muslim voters.

Hassan Shibly, executive director for CAIR, based in Tampa, said such speakers not only inflame anti-Islam tensions but have also led to discriminatory legislation: namely Senate Bill 386, which would ban foreign laws from being enacted in Florida; and House Bill 921, which allows school districts to select textbooks instead of adhering to the statewide curriculum.

Shibly said the textbook debate came about after a parent in Volusia County became uncomfortable with the number of pages in a history textbook that described Islam and organized a protest to persuade the school district to stop using the book. The Volusia School District noted that there are many more references to Christianity in the textbook than there are to Islam.

Shibly said the letters were only sent to Republican lawmakers and groups because Republicans drafted and support these two bills and because no other party has invited anti-Islam speakers to give presentations.

“Our office has documented a pattern of local GOP organizations inviting extremist anti-Muslim speakers who promote fear and hatred of the entire Muslim faith and community, often under the pretense of targeting ‘radicals,’ ” Shibly wrote in the letter.

Sen. Nancy Detert, who represents Sarasota County and part of Charlotte County, refused to comment on the two bills and the letter sent out by CAIR.

“Why should I care about a letter sent out by someone I know nothing about? Is that really worth a story?” Detert said….

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

A controversy erupted last week at the National September 11 Memorial Museum over exactly how the museum should depict what happened on that fateful day. So it’s time to give them a few unsolicited suggestions.

The New York Times reported that Muslim leaders in New York are angry about a film that is slated to be shown at the museum titled The Rise of Al Qaeda because it “refers to the terrorists as Islamists who viewed their mission as a jihad.” Sheikh Mostafa Elazabawy, the imam of Masjid Manhattan, wrote to the museum’s director: “The screening of this film in its present state would greatly offend our local Muslim believers as well as any foreign Muslim visitor to the museum.”

Wait – aren’t the “local Muslim believers,” as well as any given “foreign Muslim visitor,” supposed to be part of the vast majority of Muslims worldwide who abhor and reject al Qaeda? So why would a film about al Qaeda offend them? Because, Elazabawy explains, “unsophisticated visitors who do not understand the difference between Al Qaeda and Muslims may come away with a prejudiced view of Islam, leading to antagonism and even confrontation toward Muslim believers near the site.”

Akbar Ahmed, a professor at American University and a renowned and respected moderate Muslim, complained that people who see the film are “simply going to say Islamist means Muslims, jihadist means Muslims.” While he acknowledged that “the terrorists need to be condemned and remembered for what they did,” he warned that “when you associate their religion with what they did, then you are automatically including, by association, one and a half billion people who had nothing to do with these actions and who ultimately the U.S. would not want to unnecessarily alienate.”

But this is a sleight-of-hand: it is not the 9/11 Museum that is associating their religion with what they did. It was the 9/11 hijackers themselves who associated their religion with what they did. Elazabawy and Ahmed want the museum to ignore and whitewash that fact, and it will almost certainly comply: it has already begun to do so by removing mention of “Islamic terrorism” from its website.

In a just world, however, it would highlight these five truths:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

5. The 9/11 hijackers were Islamic jihadists acting in accord with Islamic imperatives.

Many thanks to God, for his kind gesture, and choosing us to perform the act of Jihad for his cause and to defend Islam and Muslims. Therefore, killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion….We ask to be near to God, we fight you and destroy you and terrorize you. The Jihad in god’s [sic] cause is a great duty in our religion.

They quoted numerous Qur’an verses, including one stating that “to those against whom war is waged, permission is given (to fight,) because they are wronged and verily, Allah is most powerful for their aid” (22:39), and another commanding Muslims to “fight in the way of Allah those who fight you, but be not the transgressor, Allah likes not the transgressors” (2:190). They even quoted the notorious “Verse of the Sword”: “Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush” (9:5).

To cinch their case, they used two verses enjoining Muslims to strike terror into the hearts of their foes: “Soon shall we cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, for that they joined companies with Allah, for which he has sent no authority; There [sic] place will be the fire; and evil is the home of the wrongdoers” (3:151); and “Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the heart of the enemies of Allah and your enemies” (8:60).

Five years have passed, and no moderate Muslim authority has taken up this Islamic case for 9/11 and refuted it on Islamic grounds. This doesn’t mean that the jihadist argument is ipso facto correct, but for Elazabawy and Ahmed to pretend, and to demand that the 9/11 museum pretend, that the 9/11 plotters had no Islamic case and did not identify Islam as the motive and justification for their actions simply flies in the face of the facts.

4. The hijackers hoped to strike fear in the hearts of non-Muslims.

In accord with the Qur’anic imperative to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah, Mohammed Atta reminded himself in notes he wrote just before the attack to do just that:

When the confrontation begins, strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world. Shout, “Allahu Akbar,” because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers. God said: ‘Strike above the neck, and strike at all of their extremities.’ Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty, and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out, “Come hither, friend of God.” They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing.

The “Strike above the neck, and strike at all of their extremities” quote is also from the Qur’an (47:4). The gardens and women of Paradise are also spoken of in the Qur’an (52:17-20; 55:62-76; etc.), underscoring the fact that Atta and his companions saw their mission and goal in exclusively Islamic terms.

3. The ultimate purpose of the attack was to call the U.S. to Islam.

In Osama bin Laden’s letter to the American people, which was published on November 24, 2002, he put it succinctly: “The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.” This was the ultimate purpose of the 9/11 attacks: to weaken the American economy, so that ultimately the American government would collapse. That, presumably, would end what bin Laden and his allies considered to be unacceptable American interference in Muslim countries, and pave the way for the U.S. itself to become an Islamic state.

2. Many Muslim organizations besides al Qaeda share that goal.

Not all Muslims who want to see the U.S. become a Sharia state are engaging in jihad terror groups. Some are working for the same goal by peaceful means. Islamic supremacist writer Reza Aslan, a board member of a lobbying group for the bloodthirsty and genocidally antisemitic Iranian regime, has said: “No American Muslim, zero, absolutely none, not a single one has ever, ever called for the imposition of Shariah in America.” But that is not true. Daniel Pipes has noted that the imam Siraj Wahhaj, an American convert to Islam and sought-after speaker in mosques and Islamic centers nationwide, advocated for a caliphate in a 1992 speech to a U.S. Muslim audience: “if only Muslims were more clever politically, he told his New Jersey listeners, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.” Said Wahhaj: “If we were united and strong, we’d elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him….[T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us.”

Omar Ahmad, CAIR’s co-founder and longtime board chairman, told a Muslim crowd in California in 1998 that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran…should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”

1. The Boston Marathon bombing, the Fort Hood massacre, and other attacks were perpetrated by people holding the same ideology and goals.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration do their best to deny and downplay the fact, but both the Boston Marathon bombing and the Fort Hood massacre were motivated by exactly the same thing that motivated the 9/11 attack: a desire to defend Islam from perceived attack and to spread it at the expense of infidel governments. CNN reported a week after the bombings that “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, wounded and held in a Boston hospital, has said his brother — who was killed early Friday — wanted to defend Islam from attack.” And on the morning of November 5, 2009, the day he murdered 13 Americans at Fort Hood, Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan gave a neighbor a copy of the Qur’an and told her, “I’m going to do good work for God.”

Yet on the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon jihad attack, government officials and the mainstream media barely mentioned Islam. And the U.S. government notoriously classified Hasan’s murders not as an act of terror (much less jihad), but as “workplace violence.”

As I show in my book Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In, this denial and unreality is all-pervasive. And it virtually guarantees that there will be more jihad attacks.

The 9/11 Museum could strike a blow for truth and national security by speaking honestly about what happened on 9/11 and calling for greater readiness in the face of the same threat in the future. But given today’s politically correct climate, it is unlikely to withstand the pressure it is now receiving. Soon it will probably change the description of the 9/11 hijackers to “radical violent extremists,” and everyone will be happy – especially the ideological brethren of those “extremists” we dare not name, who will take happy advantage of our refusal to face realistically the threat they pose.

*****

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

A Muslim religious leader who helped spearhead a push to get the National September 11 Memorial Museum to censor references to Islam in a short film about al-Qaida has said Jews "killed the Prophets and Messengers" and are a "cancer ... in every generation as they get in power."

Mustafa Elazabawy, imam at Masjid Manhattan, made the remarks in a December 2008 khutbah, or sermon, called "Children of Israel." A recording of the sermon remains on the mosque's website.

Elazabawy wrote a letter to museum leadership last month, complaining that the 6-minute film about al-Qaida's rise "would greatly offend our local Muslim believers as well as any foreign Muslim visitor to the museum," if it is not changed. "Unsophisticated visitors who do not understand the difference between Al Qaeda and Muslims may come away with a prejudiced view of Islam, leading to antagonism and even confrontation toward Muslim believers near the site."

He also joined in a follow-up complaint sent to museum Director Alice Greenwald on behalf of New York Disaster Interfaith Services' advisory group. Critics have taken issue with the film's references to "jihad" and the hijackers' Islamist ideology. "If generalized labels are needed, we suggest using specific terms such as "Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism," the letter from the Interfaith Services group said.

Similar complaints were issued by Islamist groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

The museum is scheduled to open in two weeks. Thus far, officials have indicated they do not plan to make changes to the film.

Elazabawy's demands for interfaith sensitivity were absent during the 2008 sermon, which came during Israel's Operation Cast Lead incursion into Gaza aimed at curbing Hamas rocket-fire toward civilian communities in Israel. He emphasized a series of Quranic verses depicting Jews as mischievous and corrupt.

"And after the mischievement (sic), they will seem arrogant," Elazabawy explained after reading one verse. "'We are the powerful. We are the most powerful people. We could defeat whomever we need.' Arrogance actually came from the shaytan [devil] all the time."

Later, he seemed to blame Jews for the war in Afghanistan.

"What they did, if you remember my brothers, the war in Afghanistan, behind that, the war is exactly the state of violence. They went in that land after Allah give the victory for the people of Afghanistan against Russia, they came because they don't want anybody to have power, except them ... and they bring all their allies to Iraq to finish Iraq, return Iraq, 100 years back. Why? Because Iraq used to be number four in power. They don't want anybody in power. And they use the hypocrites of the Muslims to help them, and the Muslim follow them, because they control the money, they control the weapons, they do everything."

Jews were spreading mischief in Egypt, Sudan and Somalia, he said.

"They are cancer in everywhere, in every generation as they get in power. People turn their face, and they know they are tyrants, they know they are oppressors. They know that they kill the children of Muslim all the time. But everybody permits it because they controlling the money and the position in the whole entire world."

At another point, Elazabawy said it wasn't Jews that he opposed, but "the state of violence ... that will kill even the Yahud [Jew]."

The rare Jews Elazabawy embraces are radical orthodox Jews who see Zionism, the belief in a Jewish homeland, as sacrilegious. Two months after delivering this sermon, Elazabawy joined Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss at a City College panel discussion in New York. Weiss leads Neturei Karta, which opposes Israel's existence.

Zionism, Weiss said that night, "is rooted in blasphemy, in, in a rebellion against God. But the whole concept of having a piece of land happens to be, in the teachings of the Torah, forbidden."

Weiss must have felt he was in good company with the panelist to his right, Elazabawy, to whom he makes brief reference, as a fellow anti-Zionist. According to Weiss, Jews and Muslims have almost always lived in harmony:

"It was mentioned that the Jews, Muslim people… these are people, we have been living together truly for hundreds and hundreds of years," Weiss said. "This was prior to any human rights, before there was a United Nations, before any human rights were there to protect, there was no protection – except of course, God the Almighty. And we were able to coexist, live in harmony, in every single Muslim country, in every single Arab country, we were able to coexist, and there was, without any police protection."

Elazabawy does not object. So even though Elazabawy has said Jews are a "cancer" in every generation and have "killed the Prophets and the Messengers," Weiss and Elazabawy manage to bond over their shared antipathy toward the Jewish state.

In his khutbah two months earlier, however, Elazabawy said Jews rejected the prophet "because he came from the Arab and he did not come from them, what they said? They declare a war from the first day and hatred against Islam."

And in a world in which baseless anti-Semitic conspiracy theories like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion continue to circulate, Elazabawy told worshipers a story so grotesque it cannot be found on Internet trash sites.

During the Six Day War, then-Israeli military leaders Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon would butcher pregnant Palestinian women for sport, Elazabawy said:

"They kill our children. It's halal [kosher] for them. It is a hero. It is a victory ... Begin and Sharon in 1967, they used to bring the Palestinian women, pregnant Palestinian women. They used to bet between both of them is it son or girl, boy or girl, between Sharon and Begin. And then after all what they did, they killed with a knife, and they opened the belly of the woman to find out if there is a boy or there is a girl. If they found it's a boy, they killed the boy and they leave it exactly the same what Pharaoh did with them before.

It is a disgusting canard. Had it any legitimacy, it would be widely reported and invoked incessantly. But Elazabawy wasn't interested in facts that day. And this is the faith leader who is admonishing the National September 11 Memorial Museum about language in a film about al-Qaida that is accurate.

After, of course - it was discovered that a teacher assigned students to write an essay debating the veracity of the Holocaust. Spencer rightly asks: "Were these death threats even real - or was this another attempt by a jihadist Muslim to deflect attention from his agenda?" See below:

It is a tragedy and a shame that it had to take the mass kidnapping and sexual enslavement of 300 Nigerian girls by Muslim jihadists for the world to finally express its outrage over Sharia’s evil deeds. Similar stories of Christian girls being kidnapped, forcibly married and converted to Islam by their Muslim captors, have been a reality for decades. But unfortunately, and tragically, they have been ignored by our mainstream media. Only a few “Islamophobic” journalists have cared enough to report on such atrocities in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere — until reality exploded to such a great magnitude that it awakened the world’s conscience.

Former Muslim women like Wafa Sultan, Ayan Hirsi Ali and myself have been writing and speaking about the oppression of women in Islamic society for a long time now. I have written a book dedicated to connecting the dots between Islamic law and such kidnappings, rapes and other forms of oppression of women. But instead of helping our voices be heard, the leftist media and academia have ignored us, called us names and done everything in their power to silence us. They have treated the American people like children who are told they should not be outraged about far away cultural practices — because all cultures are equal.

Advocates of cultural relativism who are brutal in judging conservative and Christian Americans, and call them slanderous names, have no problem in tolerating Islamic tyranny over women and other minorities.

After 9/11 Americans asked: “Where are the voices of Arab Americans who condemn Islamic terrorism?” This question led a few brave former Muslim women to stand up and speak. But when we did (at our own peril), the leftist media and academia called us “Islamophobes” and “racists.” What is Islamophobic and racist about warning America about the tyranny of the barbaric religious legal system that we lived under and came to America to escape from its vicious clutches?

Muslims have convinced the leftist elites that criticism of Islamic doctrine is a hateful phobia equal to hating all Muslim people. Students who wanted to learn the truth about Sharia and its implications on women, jihad, the Arab Israeli conflict and terrorism, have been intimidated and forced to withdraw their invitation to former Muslim women speakers.

Not only have Muslim Brotherhood front groups and the Left succeeded in silencing speech critical of Islam, but reports about Islamic atrocities around the world have been suppressed — until now, when one horrifying story of an Islamic crime against humanity could not be contained.

And so now, with the Nigerian kidnapping story, Islam’s dirty little secret has been exposed: Sharia legalizes the taking of female hostages as sexual slaves in the jihad battle against non-Muslims. And since the jihad battle against non-Muslims is taught as a permanent institution, the kidnapping, rape and enslavement can happen at any time. In fact, the Islamic Nigerian mass kidnappers, who are experts on Sharia, are bragging on camera about their actions because they are told by their books and Islamic education that what they did is holy and legal under Allah.

American students who invite experts on Middle Eastern culture and critics of Sharia, like myself, must endure horrific pressure to cancel our invitations. No matter what horror happens under Islam, we end up being dismissed by the Left as “Islamophobes.”

As a result of the suppression of the truth about Islamic oppression of women, the American public is left ignorant about what is going on in the Islamic world. Thus it takes huge acts of violence, such as the Nigeria mass girl kidnapping or 9/11 to wake Americans up. But for how long can the West afford to ignore Islamic tyranny? I hope not until Islamic jihadists do a similar kidnapping of 300 American girls.

Our culture’s suppression of speech is severely detrimental to the future of this country, which is on its way to embracing Sharia as just another set of laws that must be respected, since, as we are taught, all cultures and religions are equal.

It is high time for American leftist feminists to acknowledge the truth about Islamic oppression of women. Kidnapping of girls, sexual slavery, female genital mutilation, wife beating, legal discrimination against women in the courtroom and other forms of oppression of women, must never be tolerated under the excuse of cultural relativism.

The same leftists who ignore Islamic Sharia tyranny are also the ones who support anti-Semitism also spreading on college campuses. The offensive annual Israel Apartheid Week must end, otherwise pro-Israel students must be free to invite speakers to counter the anti-Israel propaganda.

Just in the last month, I was cancelled twice after being invited to speak on college campuses due to intimidation by leftists and Islamic groups. Muslim radical groups brag about our cancellation like a badge of honor, the same way the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt brags about silencing the opposition. Suppression of speakers who expose the atrocities of Islamic law has become a shameful chronic condition on American campuses. It is true that Sharia forbids the criticism of Islam, but we should never forget that the US Constitution does not.

The situation in America today is upside down, where we see the American Left tolerating Islamic intolerance and protecting Islam’s dirty little secrets from coming to light. We are not doing Muslims and Islam a favor with this cover-up and appeasement. Blatant atrocities against women by Muslims around the world must be exposed and rejected.

It is time for the West to condemn Islamic Sharia law by name.

« Last Edit: May 09, 2014, 11:59:12 AM by Crafty_Dog »

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

During a news conference Wednesday which cast aspects of a film about al-Qaida at the new 9/11 museum as prejudiced toward Muslims, a speaker invoked the anti-Semitic claim that Jews killed Jesus.

Talat Hamdani, whose son Salman Hamdani was a Muslim New York Police Department cadet killed on 9/11, said religion often is overlooked in other historic crimes.

"Who crucified Jesus?" she said. "Do we ever question that? Bring in the fact that not only the Romans but there were Jews who crucified Jesus?"

Jewish groups say the claim that Jews killed Jesus is one of the strongest messages fueling violent anti-Semitism. The State Department has cited similar statements in its annual reports on Global Anti-Semitism. Though it is still a widely-held belief, Pope Benedict wrote in 2011 that Jews were not responsible for the crucifixion.No one at the news conference tried to correct Hamdani's statement or walk it back.

The news conference came on the day the September 11 National Memorial Museum opened to New York's first responders and victims' families. It opens to the public May 21.

Islamist groups and their allies have taken issue with the 7-minute film, "The Rise of Al-Qaeda," since a screening last month. On Wednesday, they reiterated their belief that its references to jihad and Islamist violence are unfair and could leave visitors blaming the entire faith of Islam and all Muslims for the attacks.

Speakers included New York City Councilman Robert Jackson, Rev. Chloe Breyer, daughter of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, and Zead Ramadan of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) New York chapter.

"Suicidal terrorism" and "violent extremism" are more accurate descriptions, Ramadan said. He invoked Charles Manson, who was able to get people to do bad things. "It's unfortunate that there are people who are suicidal and not very guided, and they can be manipulated."

But al-Qaida's core ideology relies on religious justification for violence.

"The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies – civilian and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it...," Osama bin Laden wrote in his 1998 fatwa. In a 2002 letter, he cited a passage from the Quran:

"Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory" [Quran 22:39]

This verse, bin Laden wrote, means that, "It is commanded by our religion and intellect that the oppressed have a right to return the aggression. Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge."

And, according to the 9/11 Commission report, when passengers on United Flight 93 fought back, refusing to let their plane strike another target, the hijackers sent the plane into a nose dive. "Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!" one shouted.

In a martyrdom video taped before the attacks, hijacker Waleed al-Shehri made it clear he was acting out of a belief that Muslims had strayed from their faith and abandoned jihad.

"The condition of Islam at the present time makes one cry," he said," ...in view of the weakness, humiliation, scorn and enslavement it is suffering because it neglected the obligations of Allah and His orders, and permitted His forbidden things and abandoned jihad in Allah's path."

In addition to Hamdani's statement about Jews Wednesday, other advocates for changing the film have their own records of extremism.

Mustafa Elazabawy, an imam at Masjid Manhattan who wrote one of the first letters of protest to the museum, cast Jews as controlling money and the world during a 2008 sermon still available on the mosque's website. He called them a "cancer ... in every generation as they get in power." And, like Hamdani, he said Jews "killed the Prophets and the messengers."

Elazabawy claimed that the film, as it exists, "would greatly offend our local Muslim believers as well as any foreign Muslim visitor to the museum." It might leave "nsophisticated visitors who do not understand the difference between Al Qaeda and Muslims ... with a prejudiced view of Islam, leading to antagonism and even confrontation toward Muslim believers near the site."

The FBI deemed CAIR, Ramadan's group which helped organize Wednesday's news conference, as persona non grata in 2008 due to evidence it uncovered linking the group to a Hamas-support network in the United States. Reviewing that same evidence, a federal judge in Texas found "ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR ... [with] the Islamic Association for Palestine, and with Hamas."

Hamdani also decried what she saw as the inherent bigotry in the film's language, which was ironic given her comments about Jews. She acknowledged the hijackers had religious motivations.

We're told that Pamela's ads are "racist, bigoted, and hateful" by the ignorant and gullible establishment media - willing accomplices, or dupes - of CAIR and other terrorist-linked pro-Islamic groups. How dare anyone tell the truth about Islam? Further - note that these ads are ABOUT Islam - they are NOT about Hitler per se. Notice how these media outlets cover the story in order to mislead. As Pamela has repeatedly and accurately stated: "When it comes to Islam - Truth is the new hate speech."

We're told that Pamela's ads are "racist, bigoted, and hateful" by the ignorant and gullible establishment media - willing accomplices, or dupes - of CAIR and other terrorist-linked pro-Islamic groups. How dare anyone tell the truth about Islam? Further - note that these ads are ABOUT Islam - they are NOT about Hitler per se. Notice how these media outlets cover the story in order to mislead. As Pamela has repeatedly and accurately stated: "When it comes to Islam - Truth is the new hate speech."

Georgetown Rabbi Less Outraged at Islamist Jew-Hatred than Its Opponents

by Pamela Geller, Breitbart, 2 Jun 2014

Rabbi Rachel Gartner, the Director of Jewish Chaplaincy at Georgetown University, has published a ridiculous broadside at The Huffington Post titled “An Antidote for Islamophobia,” denouncing what she calls my “odious” and “heinous anti-Muslim messages” – referring to my American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) ads denouncing the savage jihad against Israel and the Qur’anically-justified anti-Semitism.

This rabbi never bothers to explain what is so “hateful” and “odious” about these ads; she just takes it for granted as she attacks a fellow Jew. But what has this rabbi herself done to combat the vicious Jew-hatred rooted in Islamic teachings that has left thousands of innocents dead? What has this rabbi done to ensure that the cold-blooded murder of little Miriam Monsonego, who was killed by jihadist Mohamed Merah at her school in Toulouse in March 2012 in the name of the Qur’an and Islam, would be the last in the cause of jihad?

Where has Rabbi Rachel spoken about the bloody 1,400-year history of Jews in Muslim lands? She quotes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “In a free society, not all are guilty, but all are responsible.” Then she adds, “Let’s take responsibility for countering hate speech wherever we encounter it, lest we all go crashing down together.” Yes, let’s do that, Rachel. When have you countered the vicious Jew-hatred that is an increasingly common feature on college campuses and from BDS groups, as well as in Arab media (as the Middle East Media Research Institute and Palestinian Media Watch so indefatigably chronicle), and even in sermons in all too many mosques?

Gartner also says, “The antidote to bad, ill-advised free speech is good, healthy free speech.” I totally agree. Where, then, was Gartner standing up for my right to speak when Jewish groups in Los Angeles and Toronto canceled my speaking engagements? Shouldn’t she have called for discussion and debate to show whose free speech was really “bad” and “ill-advised” and whose was “good” and “healthy”?

She would never have done that, because that would have revealed the hollowness of her opposition to my message, just as she never explains in her Huffington Post piece exactly what is wrong with my ads. Instead, she just claims that they’re “actually hate speech in political garb.”

She may think this because my ad refers to the fact that Islamic Jew-hatred is in the Quran. “Keep the Quran out of it,” she demands. “Unless you also want to reference suras like this one (there are many): ‘Indeed, I, God, sent down the Torah, in which was guidance and light, and the prophets judged by it, as did the rabbis and scholars.’ (Quran 5:44)”

Is she seriously claiming that the Quran is more favorable than unfavorable to the Jews? She seems to have missed a key distinction: the Quran is favorable to Jews who accept Muhammad as a prophet and the Quran as a holy book, and venomous to those who do not. The “unbelievers among the People of the Book” are the “most vile of created beings” (98:6). Does she know that the Qur’an says that the Jews are the worst enemies of the Muslims: “the most hostile to those who believe are the Jews” (5:82)?

Yes, the Qur’an says that in the Torah was guidance and light. But it also says of the Jews that “a party from among them indeed used to hear the Word of Allah, then altered it after they had understood it” (2:75), and it is common teaching among Muslims that the Torah as it stands today has been altered and corrupted by Jews in order to erase prophecies of the coming of Muhammad. The Jews’ corruption of their own Scriptures is referenced in the Hadith as well.

But none of that likely matters to Rachel Gartner, for she claims that “all sacred texts can be used to elevate us or to appeal to the basest of human instincts. Choose the high road, share teachings of peace and understanding, respect and love. If you do so, it will strengthen others in doing the same.” Great. But what about the Muslims who read the Qur’an’s many denunciations of the Jews and come away believing, in the words of a music video that was shown on Hamas’s official Al-Aqsa TV station, “Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah?”

Gartner seems to think that the existence of Muslims who don’t think that way cancels out and compensates for the existence of those who do. But it doesn’t. They are all too real, and in numbers that are all too large. Or maybe Gartner thinks that if we challenge Muslims who believe this way it will offend those who don’t. But why would it, if they sincerely reject Islamic anti-Semitism?

This weak and cowardly rabbi sanctions the annihilation of the Jewish people by savagely attacking those who stand against it.

The post Pamela Geller, Breitbart: An Antidote for the Self-Loathing Jew appeared first on Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugs.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

The world is in flames because of jihad, and yet the fog of deception is thicker than ever. If you have ever tried to point out to friends or coworkers the violent texts and teachings of Islam that jihadists use to justify violence and supremacism, you may have experienced its effects yourself: charges of “racism,” “bigotry,” and “hatred”; invocations of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Book of Joshua; and a reminder that the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that Muslims “together with us…adore the one, merciful God” (841).

Yet none of this actually addresses the uniqueness of the jihad phenomenon: Muslims, not Christians or Jews or Hindus or Buddhists, are committing acts of violence today on a global scale, and justifying those acts and making recruits by pointing to their own sacred texts. When foes of jihad terror point this out, however, they tend to place themselves in the position of Dr. Thomas Stockmann in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.

The play is a marvelous parable for our times. Stockmann’s town is famous and prosperous because of its baths, which are believed to have healing properties. But then Stockmann finds to his horror that the baths are not beneficial at all, but actually poisonous, and are making those who bathe in them even worse off than they were previously.

Ever the good citizen, Stockmann sends a report on this to the town’s mayor, recommending that the baths be closed temporarily and costly repairs undertaken to render the waters truly medicinal and not deadly. He expects that the townspeople will be grateful to him for pointing out this looming disaster and helping them avert it. But to his shock, the town leaders are dismissive, even contemptuous, of his findings. They refuse to say anything publicly about what he has discovered, for fear of causing panic and demoralization among the townspeople and ruining the reputation of the baths, which could bankrupt the town.

They warn Stockmann to keep quiet and go along as well, but he refuses, calling a town meeting on his own. There, he is shocked again as the townspeople show themselves no more receptive to his discoveries and recommendations than the authorities were. They see that the baths are making the town rich, and that Stockmann’s findings will hurt the town’s reputation and cost a great deal of money to implement — and they don’t care that the benefits of implementing the repairs he recommends will outweigh the liabilities in the long run. They make fun of him and denounce him, calling him an enemy of the people. And with Stockmann thoroughly discredited, they continue happily on their pathway to their own destruction, and the destruction of untold numbers of other people.

That, in a nutshell, is what will happen to you if you stand up against jihad terror today. Willful ignorance completely blankets the discourse about jihad-related issues.

A particularly egregious example came in the UK’s Daily Mail this week, in a piece devoted to how jihadists from Nigeria and Kenya to Syria and Iraq have set so much of the world aflame. The Mail interviewed Andreas Krieg, a Middle East security analyst at King’s College London in Qatar, about the rise of “Islamist extremism.” Krieg agreed that there was a problem: “All the empirical evidence shows that it is on the rise. You’re seeing it in all the headlines, then you’re looking at Iraq, you’re looking at Syria, you’re looking at Nigeria.” However, he added, “in all three cases this has nothing to do with Islam. I think people in the West may think it is because they feel alienated by Islam. There is a lot of Islamaphobia.”

Krieg attempted an explanation for how all this Islam that has nothing to do with Islam came about: “When communities become disenfranchised – and lot of them are Muslim – they use Islam to further their particular cause. They adhere to a radical interpretation of Islam, but it has nothing to do with the religion.”

How could a “radical interpretation of Islam” have “nothing to do with the religion”? How could it be possible that these groups that uniformly explain and justify their actions on the basis of Islam have nothing to do with Islam? How can it be that a group that calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant and another that calls itself the Congregation of the People of the Sunnah for Dawah and Jihad have nothing to do with Islam?

It is also noteworthy that this risible interview got printed at all. What stake does the mainstream media have in absolving Islam of responsibility for evils perpetrated in its name and in accord with its teachings? Why does the mainstream media always rush to exonerate Islam of any connection to the ever-mounting number of atrocities done in its name and inspired by its texts and teachings, instead of explaining the ideology that jihadis say motivates and inspires them?

This fog of deception and willful ignorance is only hindering genuine attempts to formulate positive and effective ways to limit the power of Islamic teachings to incite to violence. But it doesn’t look as if it is going to clear anytime soon.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

I put it here, however, and not in the Libya thread because the FBI report, among a lot of other things, went into the relationship between The El Rukns Chicago street gang, who (according to the report) were the ones Qaddafi allegedly was going to hire to hit Reagan. So I googled around about it. Interesting reading, if mostly or only for historical context.

This is from Wiki: "The Blackstone Rangers were founded at the St. Charles Institution for Troubled Youth by Jeff Fort and Eugene Hairston as a community organization for black youth in the Woodlawn area of South Chicago. In the 1960s they evolved into one of the most dangerous and powerful gangs in Chicago. Fort seized upon the gang's changed mission, renaming it the Black P. (Pyramid) Stone Nation. He transformed the BPSN into a black nationalistic group, and continued to involve the gang in street crime and drug trafficking."

I was only 17 at the time of Fort's 1987 trial so I don't remember much except the alleged threat against Reagan.

Is it me, or do the same theme's keep coming up? Maybe It's just the stuff I've been reading today: Alinsky + Ayers + Chicago political machinery + Chicago organized crime + 60's radical communist movement + the ideological left as presently manifested in the academies + radicalized Islam = the policies of the current administration? Thoughts? I really don't subscribe to the idea that everything is supposedly one big conspiracy theory but there's no denying teh prima fascia evidence that the same names and connections keep coming up... like I said, maybe it's just been the stuff I've been browsing today. Except nothing I was really reading seemed to obviously come from Tin-foil-hat land; it was mostly historical fact and not much in the way of opinion.

If nothing else, simply Googling "el rukn street gang in chicago" will give folks some interesting reading. Like I said, mostly historical but it was a "who knew?" for me.

That particular verse in the Koran reads, “We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve for what they have associated with Allah of which He had not sent down [any] authority. And their refuge will be the Fire, and wretched is the residence of the wrongdoers.”

I'm not afraid. In fact, in keeping of the spirit as walking as a warrior for all of one's days, I doubt the people who spray painted that know or the other people that follow that belief really know what they're biting off. It may be a bit more than they can chew.

The thought of those types coming here to Mexico makes me chuckle. Americans, if quarrelsome amongst each other, are still certainly known for prizing freedom above all costs. I'm just wondering how long it is until country sized parking lots are made and people are deported en masse (reference Japanese internment camps).

You have it right. The problem is that the ONLY thing these type of people understand/respect/fear is force equal to or greater than what they inflict upon their victims.We have an administration in the White House presently that either doesn't understand this, and/or considers the jihadists as useful tools for accomplishing their goal of consolidation of power and tyrannical rule.

I maintain, along with you, that they know not what they are dealing with. While many Americans will allow themselves to be sheep led to the slaughter, there is a small but significant minority of us who will never allow this to happen.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Every week brings new reports of Muslims in America flocking to join ISIS. Those who aren’t killed in battle will eventually return to New York, to Los Angeles and to Minneapolis–Saint Paul.

And they will stop being Iraq’s problem and become our problem.

ISIS is more than just another terrorist group. It is now an Islamic State. Its followers and allied militias pledge to obey the Caliph of ISIS and reject all allegiances to other states and entities. Western ISIS recruits burn their passports to show that they are no longer citizens of those countries.

Like most Salafists, ISIS members see our system of law and government as idolatry and heresy. Fort Hood Jihadist Nidal Hasan, who recently applied to join ISIS, had earlier written that he would “renounce any oaths of allegiances that require me to support/defend any man made constitution (like the Constitution of the United States) over the commandments mandated in Islam.”

“I therefore formally renounce my oath of office as well as any other implicit or explicit oaths I have made in the past … This includes my oath of U.S. citizenship,” Hasan declared.

By his own admission, Nidal Hasan is no longer a United States citizen. He should be promptly denaturalized. So should every ISIS member and anyone who supports the Islamic State.

The oath of citizenship that Hasan was retroactively rejecting states, “I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.”

ISIS members have pledged their allegiance to a foreign prince and a foreign state. Denaturalizing them should be a mere formality.

Anwar Al-Awlaki, Hasan’s mentor, whose American citizenship became such an issue for the left when he was killed in a drone strike, was clear in his lectures that he was at war with America, that “Muslims in the West should see their stay there as temporary” before leaving to build an Islamic State in the Middle East and that Muslims shouldn’t even vote in America because they would be participating in “a disbelieving system, in a disbelieving country.”

Like Hasan, he did not consider himself an American in any way, shape or form.

In the past the United States had denaturalized Nazis and Communists and even specifically targeted foreign agitators linked to the Nazis and Communists, denaturalized them and then deported them.

Recently Obama Inc. found the time to have two former Guatemalan soldiers accused of committing atrocities against a village linked to Communist guerrillas in the so-called Dos Erres massacre back in the 1980s stripped of their citizenship.

Other denaturalization targets under his administration included two Serbians, an Ethiopian Marxist who took part in the 70s Red Terror and a woman involved in the Rwandan genocide.

None of the denaturalized were Muslim terrorists posing a current national security threat. And yet if we are to have a strategy against ISIS, denaturalizing its members will accomplish more than air strikes.

The modern Jihadist threat had at its core a group of fighters who trained and fought in Afghanistan during and after the Soviet invasion. These fighters went on to lead terrorist groups and stage attacks. But the battlefields of the Arab Spring will produce a new wave of threats on an unprecedented scale. Muslims in the West, especially converts to Islam, who have gone to join ISIS will return with training, battlefield experience and a plan. It’s far more urgent to keep them out than to deport war criminals.

A serious ISIS strategy has to address not the flow of fighters from the United States, as Obama has proposed to do, but the flow of fighters coming into the United States. If ISIS members want to travel to fight in Iraq and Syria, they should be allowed to do so.

By joining the Islamic State, they have disavowed their allegiance to the United States. Their citizenship is now only a passport of convenience that they will burn as soon as they make their way into Syria.

It’s far more important to keep them from coming back than to keep them from leaving.

If the United States can denaturalize foreign soldiers for being part of units linked to war crimes, as it has under Obama, it has the obligation to pursue the denaturalization of anyone who chooses to affiliate with an organization such as ISIS which has committed undeniable war crimes. While the legal grounds for denaturalization won’t be the same since some of those being denaturalized did not have terrorist histories and may have even been born in the United States, the policy basis is clear.

Despite the various dubious Supreme Court attempts to strike down the denaturalization power of Congress, there are still clear standards for denaturalization. Joseph Lieberman and Scott Brown introduced the Terrorist Expatriation Act back in 2010 which would have added providing material support to terrorists as a basis for denaturalization leading to hysterical reactions on the left and the right. But such an explicit addition isn’t strictly necessary; particularly in the case of the Islamic State.

Under the Immigration and Naturalization Act anyone voluntarily “committing any act of treason”, bearing arms against the United States or plotting to conquer it will lose his citizenship. While establishing this has proven tricky in the past due to the preponderance of evidence standard, ISIS represents a clear case because its fighters travel voluntarily from the United States for that purpose and because the Islamic State’s creed explicitly repudiates citizenship in anything but the new Caliphate.

It is clearly apparent that any American citizen joining ISIS intends to abandon his citizenship. He is not only serving in a foreign army, but he is joining an organization whose very reason for existence is precluded on a rejection of states and manmade documents such as the United States Constitution.

Furthermore if Obama were to admit that the United States is at war with ISIS, its fighters would also be guilty of bearing arms against the United States. However even without this admission, ISIS has made sufficient threats and has now murdered two Americans. There is no serious doubt that we are at war.

Unlike the Taliban, some of whose American members argued that they had not originally been in conflict with the United States, ISIS originated in conflict with the United States and its creed explicitly calls for the perpetuation of conflict not only with the United States, but with the rest of the world.

The Islamic State’s founding declaration urged all the Muslims of the world to gather to it, “So rush O Muslims and gather around your Caliphate, so that you may return as you once were for ages, kings of the earth and knights of war… By Allah, if you disbelieve in democracy, secularism, nationalism, as well as all the other garbage and ideas from the west, and rush to your religion and creed, then by Allah, you will own the earth, and the east and west will submit to you.”

The Muslim fighters rushing to join ISIS hoping to be its “kings of the earth” and “knights of war” and to force the east and west to submit to it are at war with the United States. They have given their allegiance to a foreign power that promises them that they will rule over Americans.

Both attacks on the World Trade Center were carried out by terrorists who should not have been allowed into the United States. It’s time we learned the lessons of those attacks.

ISIS members and supporters like Nidal Hasan are eager to abandon their American citizenship. It’s our own government that is standing in the way.

It’s useless to bomb ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, if we let them march through our airports.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Well, some also "worship" satan. Some Idolize Hitler and other mass murderers. So this is not too surprising. Probably isolated kid who feels like outcast so as to feel like part of something bigger she does this stuff. There is something romantic about being a "revolutionary" as well. Fosters romance amongst the young. Reminds me of the Stalin biography and how so many women were attracted to him even before he was powerful. It was the young romance thing. Like "Oh we are saving the world together". Wasn't being an anti war protester in the 60s a way for kids to connect. To get girls or guys.

It sure doesn't help to have a liberal MSM and educational system that has made America into the world's evil villain responsible for all its problems. The poor oppressed Muslims and the Indians and the Blacks, and Women, and the rest of it. All evil Western Christian white men.

Perhaps they should have let her go to Syria. She wants to be there in that environment and that culture. Good riddance. Eventually she would come crawling back begging to be American again. If not killed raped or enslaved by then:

Boston’s WCVB.com reported Monday that “the federal government is targeting Boston and two other American cities to shut down what they are calling the U.S.-Jihad pipeline to ISIS in an attempt to stop Americans from joining the terrorist organization.” Boston apparently made this elite list because Ahmad Abousamra, “an American college graduate from Boston, who has been on the run from the FBI for years, is suspected of joining ISIS and leveraging his computer skills to spread the Iraqi terror group’s propaganda on social media.” And so now Boston is reaping what it has sown for so many years.

The Islamic State has been linked to the Islamic Society of Boston. The Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston Marathon jihad mass murderers, went to mosque at the Islamic Society of Boston. So did other convicted jihad terrorists, Tarek Mehanna and Aafia Siddiqui. During all this, the FBI conducted “outreach” to the Islamic Society of Boston but never investigated it. Now they’re reaping the fruits of their politically correct willful ignorance.

Former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino really, really wanted the Islamic Society of Boston to be well situated in the city. He gave the ISB an astonishing sweetheart deal on the land for the mosque. Menino, according to a 2008 Boston Phoenix exposé, “in a fit of multicultural ecumenicalism, approved the sale of city-owned land to the mosque for the bargain basement — and still controversial — price of $175,000, plus the promise of in-kind services, including upkeep of nearby parks. The predictable uproar that arose in the wake of not only selling land well below market rates, but also selling it to a religious institution in contravention of the supposed separation of church and state, was supposed to be muffled by making the complex available for community use. But oops — that never happened. The promised community facilities for non-congregant use still have not been built.”

Not only that, but although it was “originally intended to minister to an urban congregation of African-American Muslims, the mosque project was turned over by the city, with no fanfare and little notice, to the control of suburban-based Muslims of largely Saudi Arabian heritage: the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which more recently became the Muslim American Society of Boston (MAS-Boston). Perhaps the city believed, incorrectly, that one Muslim community could easily step in for another. In fact, the two groups are quite different.”

The Muslim American Society is the principal name under which the Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States. According to a captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document, the Brotherhood’s “work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

So Menino was instrumental in the construction of a Muslim Brotherhood mosque in Boston, which the Tsarnaevs attended. Were it not for Menino and so many others like him all over the country behaving as if Muslim Brotherhood ties were a matter of no consequence, it would perhaps not be so culturally unacceptable in America today to oppose jihad terror.

It has been so unacceptable for so long, however, that the Islamic Society of Boston mosque that the Tsarnaevs attended was never investigated, despite the fact that they were not the only jihad terrorists to frequent it. Aafia Siddiqui, a.k.a. “Lady al-Qaeda,” who was convicted of trying to murder American soldiers and may also have been plotting a jihad terror attack against an American city, was also a member, as was convicted jihad terror plotter Tarek Mehanna and Abousamra. The renowned Muslim Brotherhood sheikh, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has praised Hitler and called upon Muslims to finish his job of killing Jews, was a trustee of the Islamic Society of Boston and has addressed the mosque congregation during fundraisers. Another imam who has addressed the Boston congregation, Yasir Qadhi, has called for the replacement of the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law and said that the “life and prosperity” of Christians “holds no value in the state of Jihad.”

On June 12, 2013, as the scandal of the Obama Administration’s massive surveillance of law-abiding Americans was breaking, it was revealed that while the National Security Agency was listening to every phone call and reading every email, there was one place where people could be safe from surveillance: inside a mosque. Investor’s Business Daily reported that “the government’s sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized.

Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.”

This panel “was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel’s formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques there.”

And specifically: “The FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after the April 15 attacks, and it did not check out the radical Boston mosque where the Muslim bombers worshipped.”

The FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after the April 15th attacks. If the Russians tell you that someone has been radicalized and you go check and see the mosques that they went to, then you get the articles of incorporation as I have for the group that created the Boston mosque where these Tsarnaevs attended, and you find out the name Alamoudi – which you’ll remember because while you were FBI director, this man who was so helpful to the Clinton administration with so many big things, he gets arrested at Dulles Airport by the FBI and he’s now doing over twenty years for supporting terrorism. This is the guy that started the mosque were your Tsarnaevs were attending, and you didn’t even bother to go check about the mosque? And then when you have the pictures, why did no one go to the mosque and say, “Who are these guys? They may attend here.” Why was that not done, since such a thorough job was done?

Mueller initially disputed this, saying, “Your facts are not altogether well –” In a heated exchange, Gohmert shot back: “Sir, if you’re going to call me a liar, you need to point out specifically where the facts are wrong.”

Mueller responded: “We went to the mosque. Prior to Boston,” he said vehemently. “Prior to Boston happening, we were in that mosque talking to imams several months beforehand as part of our outreach efforts.”

Gohmert then asked: “Were you aware that those mosques were started by Alamoudi?”

“I’ve answered the question, sir,” Mueller replied.

Not satisfied with this, Gohmert pressed: “You didn’t answer the question, were you aware that it was started by Alamoudi.” Mueller then admitted that he had not been.

Meanwhile, Boston refused to run our AFDI pro-freedom ads (we are suing on free speech grounds, of course). In nearby Worcester, Roman Catholic Bishop Robert McManus canceled my scheduled talk on Muslim persecution of Christians because, he said, it would harm the wonderful dialogue that local Catholics were having with Boston-area Muslims. He did this at the behest of a local Muslim leader who openly professed his support for convicted jihadist Mehanna.

And so now Boston is a hub for Islamic State recruitment. How is all that “outreach” working out?

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

A convert to Islam who calls himself Jah’Keem Yisrael (formerly Alton Alexander Nolen) beheaded one of his coworkers and was shot while in the process of trying to behead another last Friday in Vaughan Foods, a food processing plant in Oklahoma. And now the predictable denial and obfuscation from the Obama Administration has begun.

On Sunday, Tony Blinken, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, was asked whether the beheading was an act of terror or, as the Obama Administration notoriously classified the Fort Hood jihad massacre of November 2009, workplace violence. “We don’t know,” said the Dickensian-named Blinken, blinkers firmly in place. “The FBI has an active investigation. I’m not going to get ahead of it. Let’s see what they find.” Wynken and Nod were unavailable for comment.

As for the FBI itself, FBI Special Agent in Charge James E. Finch said Saturday that the bureau hadn’t yet figured out what Yisrael’s motive was. He didn’t say whether or not the feds were examining his Facebook page, which, according to the New York Daily News, is “riddled with phrases like ‘Sharia law is coming’ and calling America ‘wicked.’ It also has photos of various terror groups and their leaders, including bin Laden, who was killed by U.S. forces operating in Pakistan in 2012.”

Not only that. Jah’Keem Yisrael filled his Facebook page with quotations from the Qur’an and exhortations to his fellow Muslims to be more rigorous and correct in their observance of Islamic ritual and morality. Also the page is a photograph of him with two members of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City; Yisrael stands between them holding up his index finger in the sign of the Islamic State, signifying Islam’s uncompromising monotheism. Nor is even that all: his page features photographs of beheadings.

And while the mosque is issuing statements implying that Yisrael was a bad Muslim or hardly even a Muslim at all, and that hardly anyone knew him there anyway, I received this insider report from a former member of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City:

I went to the same mosque the Oklahoma Muslim who beheaded his co-worker today. I live ten minutes away!

The Imam was Imad Enchassi the last I heard. He was a friend of mine. He is a Lebanese-born Sunni who hates Israel. He once gave a sermon that the Israelis were trying to collapse al-Aqsa mosque by digging tunnels underneath it. They have no issue with Palestinian suicide bombings because, as it was explained to me, that is the only weapon the Palestinians have.

They sold Milestones in the book shop while I was there, which as you know calls for replacing all non-Islamic governments with Islamic ones. I remember listening to a tape a friend of mine, Yahya Graff, another white convert to Islam, had that prayed for the destruction of Israel and America.

The imam when I first converted, Suhaib Webb, is hailed as a moderate by liberals in the United States but he was the one that explicitly told me that according to Islam, three choices are to be given to non-Muslims: convert, pay the jizyah tax and live under Islamic rule, or jihad. They try very hard to whitewash Islam when the media is around, but they believe in their religion and the ultimate goal of an Islamic caliphate.

Does all this mean that Jah’Keem Yisrael’s beheading of Colleen Hufford was a jihad attack? Not necessarily. Yisrael wouldn’t be the first person to be distraught over being fired and react violently. Many non-Muslims have done that. The difference here, however, is that when Yisrael became violent, he began beheading – just as the Islamic State is doing, and just as the Qur’an exhorts believers to do (“When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks…” — 47:4).

At the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City and elsewhere, as he learned the teachings and attitudes of his new religion, Jah’Keem Yisrael breathed in an environment in which beheading was under certain circumstances a proper, even praiseworthy response.

If the Obama Administration and its FBI were at all interested in the truth of this case, they would be investigating whether or not Jah’Keem Yisrael considered the beheading of an unbeliever to be something that Allah would reward, in line with Qur’an 47:4, and seized the opportunity of his firing from Vaughan Foods (after an argument over whether or not adulteresses should be stoned to death; Yisrael argued yes) to combine his desire for revenge with his desire to wage jihad.

Instead, they will probably be doing all they can to make sure such investigations are not pursued.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

A Muslim convert who recently became very religious beheads a woman while reportedly shouting Islamic phrases. The authorities rush to convince everyone in sight that it has nothing to do with Islam.

I’m not talking about Alton Nolen in Oklahoma at the end of September, but Nicholas Salvador in the UK at the beginning of September. Salvador, a Nigerian Muslim convert, beheaded an 82-year-old European woman with a foot-long blade. Nolen killed a 54-year-old American woman with a 10-inch blade.

The bios of both men are fairly similar to the beheaders of British soldier Lee Rigby. The perpetrators were Nigerian converts to Islam. Alton Nolen was a black convert to Islam. They had a history of criminal behavior followed by a conversion to Islam and the inevitable bloody ending.

On his Facebook page, Nolen posted, “Sharia law is coming!!!” The killers of Lee Rigby had chanted for Sharia law in the streets of London. That is the same Sharia law of stonings and beheadings.

It is the law of the Koran which states, “When you meet the unbelievers in Jihad smite at their necks until you have slaughtered many of them.” (Koran 47:4)

Or as Nolen quoted after posting a gory beheading photo on his Facebook page, “Thus do we find the clear precedent that explains the peculiar penchant of Islamic terrorists to behead their victims: it is merely another precedent bestowed by their Prophet.”

The quote underneath the beheading photo backed that up, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off of them.”(Quran 8:9-13)

An unbeliever is anyone who isn’t a Muslim.

This latest “Nothing to do with Islam” atrocity follows the Islamic State’s beheading of two Americans. These acts were admired by an Oklahoma City nursing home worker who was arrested for threatening a female co-worker with an ISIS style beheading on account of her being a Christian.

Again, nothing to do with Islam. Much like the Islamic State beheadings which we have been told also have nothing to do with Islam.

This sort of “Nothing to do with Islam” beheading pops up now and again.

A decade ago Ariel Selloul was nearly decapitated in Texas by Mohammed Ali Alayed. Mo had recently gotten religion and become a devout Muslim. His victim was Jewish. Before Mohammed got serious about Islam, the two men had been friends.

Again, it had nothing to do with Islam. At least that’s what the authorities said.

Around the same time a Jewish disc jockey was murdered in Paris by a Muslim friend who announced, “I killed a Jew, I will go to paradise. Allah made me do it.”

The Muslim killer, Adel Amastaibou, had threatened a Rabbi and a pregnant Jewish woman before. Instead the authorities decided that he was mentally ill.

Nothing to do with Islam. Not a thing.

And so we have a rash of mysterious beheadings and vicious stabbings that we know nothing about except that they have nothing to do with Islam. The more they obviously seem to have something to do with Islam, the more it has to be denied that they had anything to do with Islam.

Alton and Adel, Mohammed, Mujahid and Ismail, the latter two being the Muslim names of the Lee Rigby killers, have nothing to do with Islam. Even the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.

And yet Alton Nolen decided that beheading had quite a lot to do with Islam. All he had to do to figure that out was open a Koran. Expecting to convince Muslims to believe that the Koran has nothing to do with Islam will be even harder than convincing them that beheadings and the Islamic State have nothing to do with Islam.

You might as well argue that Islam has nothing to do with Islam.

The CVE programs under Barack Obama keep promising to counter the Islamic narrative on Twitter, but instead Twitter is full of ISIS Jihadists displaying severed heads as trophies and quoting the appropriate verses from the Koran.

Obama denounces ISIS as un-Islamic for beheading people while leading a coalition against them which includes Muslim countries that use beheading as an Islamic punishment. The Saudis recently beheaded a man accused of sorcery. What’s the difference between the Islamic State and the Saudis? They both have lots of oil, terrorists and a penchant for beheading people, but the Saudis have better public relations.

Maybe when the Islamic State starts funding chairs at Georgetown and UCLA, and donating to the Clinton Global Initiative, it’ll start getting better press.

The Saudis can’t possibly be un-Islamic because the establishment’s official definition of Islam comes from them. Even the idea of denying that the Islamic State is Islamic is a Saudi strategy. But if Alton Nolen is un-Islamic then ISIS is un-Islamic and if ISIS is un-Islamic then Saudi Arabia is un-Islamic. And then Islam, whose holy book contains numerous verses calling for the brutal murder of non-Muslims, must also be un-Islamic.

Perhaps then there really isn’t an Islam. Or rather there are two Islams.

One is the oriental Unitarianism of the Western imagination whose practitioners are liberals with prayer rugs. The other is a grim relentless Jihad of murderous men who chant the Koran while severing heads. This is the Islam of the Arabian imagination. It is not always what it is, but to them it is the purity of what it should be.

The convert to Islam rarely becomes a liberal with a prayer rug. To become devout is to become more certain, not less certain. And that certainty ends in Jihad. It ends in a murder commanded by Allah.

The real Islam’s symbols carry powerful meanings. The beheading is the final and ultimate meaning. By killing non-Muslims in the name of Allah, its followers become Allah, they gain the power of life and death, to kill and enslave, to rob and rape; they become the murderous masters of creation.

When they say that “Allah made me do it” what they really mean is that the part of them that wants to kill, to rob and rape, to burn and kidnap, made them do it. By submitting to Allah, the Muslim becomes Allah. When he kills, it is Allah killing. His religion is reducible to his will to kill. This is ISIS. This is Islam.

It has nothing to do with the imaginary Islam of the liberal. It has everything to do with the real Islam.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

White House official flies to Oklahoma City to read special thank-you note from Obama to beheader’s mosque

This is how it goes in America today: a Muslim screaming what were reported as “Islamic phrases” beheads one woman and is in the process of beheading another before he is stopped. The beheader’s Facebook page shows his allegiance to the Islamic State, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, etc. A former member of his mosque comes forward with information about how the mosque teaches jihad and Islamic supremacism. And then what happens? An investigation of the mosque? The imam questioned as to whether he knew the beheader, and the beheader’s phone and email records checked for contact with mosque leaders? An examination of the teachings of the mosque to see if the beheader was incited to violence by what he heard there? No. A White House official flies to Oklahoma City to read a thank-you letter from Obama to the mosque, so as to “reassure” Muslims in Oklahoma. Who is reassuring American non-Muslims that this case is being adequately investigated and properly classified as an act of jihad terrorism? No one, of course.

“Oklahoma Muslims receive special praise from White House officials,” by Andrew Donley, KFOR.com, October 4, 2014 (thanks to Noor):

OKLAHOMA CITY – Oklahoma Muslims marked the end of the yearly pilgrimage to mecca with communal prayer and celebration called Eid Ul-Adha on Saturday.

Leaders of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City say it’s been a tough month for Muslims here in Oklahoma after being associated with the beheading at Vaughan foods in Moore.

Leaders of the faith here in the state say vicious messages are being left for Oklahoma Muslims, telling them to get out of Oklahoma and threatening to behead them all because the man behind the beheading claimed to be Muslim.

But the Muslim community received the highest form of praise from the White House for their hard work in helping rebuild the Moore community after a destructive tornado tore through the city in 2013.

Today, an official from Washington D.C. flew in to Oklahoma to present a special thank you to the Muslim congregation.

He read a message from President Barrack [sic] Obama, extending warm greetings from the American people during the Muslim holiday.

“Your service is a powerful example of the powerful roots of the Abrahamic faiths and how our communities can come together with shared peace with dignity and a sense of justice,” President Barack Obama said.

The Imam, the leader of the prayer service, stated during his sermon that the Muslim faith has been called a “cancer that needs to be cut off from the American society.”

Now, with the recent praise, Oklahoma Muslims have been reassured that they are apart of the American society.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

During the recent race riots in Ferguson, Missouri, CNN’s Jake Tapper was walking down a street and filming a segment when someone emerged out of the shadows behind him, holding a banner emblazoned, “ISIS is here.” At that point it was just a threat, or a boast, or both, but on Tuesday Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) said that the Islamic State was doing all it could to make it a reality: “At least ten ISIS fighters have been caught coming across the Mexican border in Texas.”

“There’s nobody talking about it,” Hunter added. “If you really want to protect Americans from ISIS, you secure the southern border. It’s that simple…They caught them at the border, therefore we know that ISIS is coming across the border. If they catch five or ten of them then you know there’s going to be dozens more that did not get caught by the border patrol.”

Indeed. And jihadist exploitation of our southern border is nothing new. In June 2014, Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) foreshadowed Hunter’s announcement when he said: “This jihadist group ISIS and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have promised direct confrontation with America. He is looking forward to that day and he has said that publicly, we should believe him when he says that. These folks hate everything about the United States.” What’s more, “Of course the way they would come to the United States would be through the porous border with Mexico. The drug cartels will bring people into the country no matter who they are — for money. Everyone in the world knows that the border between the United States and Mexico is completely porous.”

Jihad terrorists and their enablers and accomplices have been entering the U.S. illegally by means of the Mexican border for many years. According to TheBlaze, “Hezbollah members and supporters have entered the U.S. through the southern border as early as 2002, with the case of Salim Boughader Mucharrafille, a Mexican of Lebanese descent. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison by Mexican authorities on charges of organized crime and immigrant smuggling. Mucharrafille had owned a cafe in the border city of Tijuana, near San Diego. In 2002, he was arrested for smuggling 200 people into the U.S., including Hezbollah supporters, according to a 2009 Congressional report.”

And in May 2010, the Department of Homeland Security warned local police along the southern border about a Muslim named Mohamed Ali who was suspected of being a member of the jihad terror group al Shabaab. An official who spoke to CNN about the warning said that it wasn’t clear whether or not Mohamed Ali was trying to enter the country illegally, but it seems unlikely that such an alert would have been sent out to police along the border if that had not been the case. Ali was, in any case, apparently involved in operating a “large-scale smuggling enterprise” that had brought hundreds of Somali Muslims into the U.S. illegally.

Top officials in Washington have known about how jihad terrorists have attempted to exploit the vulnerabilities of the southern border for many years now. In 2006, the House Homeland Security Investigations Subcommittee, under the leadership of Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), issued a report entitled A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border, which stated: “Members of Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terrorist organization, have already entered to the United States across our Southwest border.”

Nothing changed. Investigative journalist Deroy Murdock reported in 2010 that “according to the federal Enforcement Integrated Database, 125 individuals were apprehended along the US/Mexican border from Fiscal Year 2009 through April 20, 2010. These deportable aliens included two Syrians, seven Sudanese, and 17 Iranians, all nationals from the three Islamic countries that the US government officially classifies as state sponsors of terrorism.” During the same period, border agents also apprehended “two Afghans, five Algerians, 13 Iraqis, 10 Lebanese, 22 Nigerians, 28 Pakistanis, two Saudis, 14 Somalis, and three Yemenis. During FY 2007 and FY 2008, federal officials seized 319 people from these same countries traversing America’s southwest border.”

Murdock grants that these illegals may simply have come to pursue the American Dream, as Leftist dogma would have it. But he notes disturbing signs to the contrary: “Besides Iranian currency and Islamic prayer rugs, Texas Border Patrol agents discovered an Arabic clothing patch that reads ‘martyr’ and ‘way to immortality.’ Another shows a jet flying into a skyscraper.” And for some, their malign intentions were unmistakable: “The Department of Homeland Security issued an April 14, 2010 ‘Intelligence Alert’ regarding a possible border-crossing attempt by a Somali named Mohamed Ali. He is a suspected member of Al-Shabaab, a Somali-based al-Qaeda ally tied to the deadly attack on American GIs in 1993’s notorious ‘Blackhawk Down’ incident in Mogadishu.”

Murdock offered an update in an April 2013 article, in which he gave the numbers of people attempting to enter the U.S. illegally via Mexico from countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism.

As indicated by the latest information in Table 34 of Customs and Border Protection’s Immigration Yearbook 2011, 198 Sudanese were nabbed while penetrating the USA. Between FY 2002 and 2011, there were 1,207 such arrests. (These figures cover all U.S. borders, although, as Table 35 confirms, 96.3 percent of the overall detainee population intruded from Mexico.) Like other immigrants, most Sudanese seek better lives here. But some may be vectors for the same militant Islam that literally tore Sudan in two.

In FY 2011, 108 Syrians were stopped at our borders; over ten years, the number is 1,353. Syria is a key supporter of Hezbollah, and Bashar Assad’s unstable regime reportedly has attacked its domestic opponents with chemical weapons.

As for Iranians, 276 were caught in FY 2011, while 2,310 were captured over the previous ten years. Iran also backs Hezbollah, hates “the Great Satan,” and craves atomic weapons.

The other ten “countries of interest” are Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, and:

Somalia: Home of Indian Ocean pirates and al-Qaeda’s al-Shabaab franchise. In October 1993, Islamic terrorists there shot down two Black Hawk helicopters, killed 18 U.S. soldiers, and dragged several of their bodies through Mogadishu’s streets. 323, 1,524.

Each passing year brings new stories of this kind, new investigations and new recommendations – but no real action to secure our southern border. And in July 2014, Breitbart News published what it described as “photos of what American security contractors on the ground believe is a Muslim prayer rug found near the border in Arizona last week.”

That same month, Texas rancher Mike Vickers found an Urdu-English Dictionary on his property, which runs along the border and is frequently trespassed upon by illegals. Urdu is, of course, the language of Pakistan, an Islamic Republic that has produced a healthy number of jihad terrorists. A Texas Border Patrol Agent noted: “We’ve found Korans, prayer rugs and many other unusual items at the border that certainly raise concern.”

All these warnings, all this information, and yet year after year, nothing is done. And as long as Barack Obama is President and the Democrats are the majority party, nothing will be done – except the repetition of the charge that concern about border security is “racist.” If the Islamic State manages to get jihadis into the country from Mexico and they succeed in mounting a large-scale attack, our leaders can console themselves amid the carnage that at least they were never “racist.”

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Bill Maher deserves some credit for sticking to his positions on Islam, jihad and Sharia, despite enormous pressure and an increasing torrent of abuse from his Leftist former friends and allies. In this interview, however, he reveals some of his own limitations: he has only a glancing knowledge of the subject matter, and is ill-equipped to answer challenges because he doesn’t realize the fallacies inherent in those challenges, any more than do those who are giving him the challenge.

Marlow Stern of the Daily Beast charges that he makes “generalizations about Islam,” and then Maher answers by arguing that it is perfectly reasonable to make generalizations about Muslims. Maher’s point is sound, but both he and Stern are failing to distinguish between Islam and Muslims. What people continually fail to grasp is the distinction between the texts and teachings of a faith, which are matters of record, and the many different ways in which people understand those texts and teachings. To say that all the schools of Islamic law teach violent jihad and the subjugation of unbelievers under the rule of Islamic law is simply a statement of fact. It can be proven or disproven with reference to the actual teachings of the schools. But if they do all teach this, and they do, that doesn’t mean that every Muslim follows those teachings, any more than the fact that the Catholic Church teaches against contraception means that every Catholic opposes contraception. There is a spectrum of belief, knowledge, and fervor among Muslims as there is among believers in every belief system, religious or not.

What I object to is the violent, authoritarian, aggressive and supremacist program of jihad that is codified in Islamic doctrine. All too often any examination or discussion of this doctrine is waved away with a reference to things Christians did hundreds of years ago, and to passages in the Bible that are purportedly as violent as those in the Qur’an. But these doctrines are actually the problem, for they can and do incite Muslims to hatred and violence. Of course many Muslims are not thus incited, and many couldn’t care less about these doctrines. But that doesn’t change the fact that some Muslims are attempting to implement this deeply traditional supremacist program. The longer we don’t address this, or caricature pointing it out, as Stern does here, as tantamount to saying that “all Muslims are generally bad,” these texts and teachings will continue to incite jihad violence, with no one even considering any ways to stop this. (It is, of course, a staple of the Leftist/Islamic supremacist response to foes of jihad terror to claim that they’re saying that “all Muslims are terrorists.”)

Finally, there is in this another example of the low level of the public discourse today: not only does Stern caricature Maher’s position as “all Muslims are generally bad,” but he also offers as a counter to this the fact that five of the last twelve Nobel Peace Prize winners were Muslim. Given that Barack Obama and Yaser Arafat are Nobel Peace Prize winners, this is not an impressive argument: the Nobel Peace Prize is notoriously politicized. But what are we supposed to make of these Muslim Nobel Peace Prize winners? Did the Qur’an and Muhammad inspire them to take the actions that led them to win the Peace Prize? Does their existence somehow make it improper or wrong or bigoted to point out that jihadis worldwide repeatedly point to the Qur’an and Sunnah to justify their actions and make recruits among peaceful Muslims, and that something should be done about this?

“Bill Maher: Yes, I Can Generalize About Muslims,” by Marlow Stern, Daily Beast, October 16, 2014:

The Ben Affleck episode on Real Time was just great television. On no other show would you see an A-list actor from a newly released blockbuster like Gone Girl getting fired up over Islam. What did you make of that heated exchange? He seemed pretty fired up the moment Sam Harris sat down.

Well, I’m done talking about it. My view is I’ve said what I had to say about it the week before, when I did a formal monologue at the end of the show that I wrote very carefully, and they were responding to that. I will say that we legitimately started a national debate on something that needs to be talked about, and it’s very gratifying to finally see that a heck of a lot of liberals understand that the real liberals in this debate are people like me and Sam.

But when you do make generalizations about Islam…

…It’s not a generalization! First of all, this is nonsense—this idea that you can’t make generalizations. All of knowledge is based on generalizations. No one can interview all 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. It’s a dumb argument. Read any history book and it’ll use the word “Christendom,” but they didn’t interview every Christian in the 1600s. We’re talking facts. We’re talking polls that have been done over decades, time and time again telling us what people are thinking about the world. So this idea that we are making generalizations? It’s just stupid. We understand that 1.5 billion people don’t all think alike and that there are differences from country-to-country, but you can’t advance any sort of knowledge without making generalizations and it doesn’t mean they’re inaccurate. To say that it’s a widespread belief in the Muslim world that death is the appropriate response to leaving the religion is just a statement of fact. We should stop arguing about that and move on from it and figure out what we can do about it. To dismiss that is just like saying, “Global warming doesn’t exist.”

If all Muslims are generally bad, then where does five of the last twelve Nobel Peace Prize winners, all of whom are Muslim—people like Malala Yousafzai—fit in?

Man, I’m done talking about this. I just don’t want to keep talking about this. I’ve said my piece, now the rest of you talk about it.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Exactly, G M - I don't trust these Imams for a second. Taqiyya is an established doctrine (lying to unbelievers) and is actually considered a duty by devout Muslims.I also thought it was both hilarious and infuriating yesterday listening to the breaking news reports from Canada and hearing reporters repeatedly stress that "authorities have not established any link between the perpetrator and radical Islam." HAH - I would have put $10K down as a bet that he was a jihadist right then and there when I first heard about it. Why are these idiot reporters (and our own President) so eager to absolve Islam of any responsibility?

Note also that we now learn that this guy was NOT a "recent convert" to Islam - nor was he poor or "underprivileged." These myths are going to result in many more dead victims until people face the ugly reality that is Islam.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Canada has experienced two murderous jihad terror attacks in the last three days, not long after the Islamic State called for such attacks – but the denial and obfuscation are as thick as ever.

On Monday, Ahmad Rouleau, a convert to Islam, hit two Canadian soldiers with his car, murdering Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent. Then he led police on a high-speed chase, during which he called 911 and explained that he was doing it all “in the name of Allah.” The chase, and Rouleau’s jihad, ended when he flipped his car and then, brandishing a knife, charged police, who shot him dead. One of Rouleau’s close friends said: “It was a terrorist attack and Martin died like he wanted to. That’s what happened….He did this because he wanted to reach paradise and assure paradise for his family. He wanted to be a martyr….The caliphate called all the Muslims on earth to fight. He listened to what they had to say and he did his part here.”

Then on Wednesday, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who has been widely reported to be a recent convert to Islam but whose father is a veteran of the jihad in Libya and who has been a Muslim for at least three years, went on a shooting rampage in Ottawa, murdering military reservist Corporal Nathan Cirillo and engaging in a gun battle inside Canada’s Parliament building. Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird said that there was “no evidence at this stage” that Zehaf-Bibeau had connections to any jihad groups, but CNN reported that “according to a U.S. counterterrorism source, Zehaf-Bibeau was connected to Hasibullah Yusufzai through social media. Yusufzai is wanted by Canadian authorities for traveling overseas to fight alongside Islamist fighters in Syria.” And “other radicalized people connected to Zehaf-Bibeau are still believed to be living in Canada, two U.S. law enforcement officials said.”

So Zehaf-Bibeau had connections to at least one jihadist who went to Syria to wage jihad, and Rouleau listened to what the Islamic State was saying, and “did his part” in Canada. What was the Islamic State saying? Late in September, the Islamic State’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani, urged Muslims to murder non-Muslims in the West. “Rely upon Allah,” he thundered, “and kill him in any manner or way however it may be. Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict. Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling.” He also addressed Western non-Muslims: “You will not feel secure even in your bedrooms. You will pay the price when this crusade of yours collapses, and thereafter we will strike you in your homeland, and you will never be able to harm anyone afterwards.”

Al-Adnani told Muslims to murder non-Muslims with any weapon at hand, or anything that could be used as a weapon: “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.” Zehaf-Bibeau found a bullet. Rouleau found a car.

Yet despite the indications that Rouleau and Zehaf-Bibeau were heeding the Islamic State’s call to wage jihad at home by any means possible, the mainstream media was ready before the blood had dried to swing into the usual denial and obfuscation about the motives and goals of their attacks. Before Zehaf-Bibeau’s identity was known, CBC’s Doug Stoffel tweeted: “Amid the speculation in the #OttawaShooting in #Canada, it’s important to remember #ISIS hasn’t shown interest in attacks abroad.” Once Zehaf-Bibeau was identified as the shooter and was known to be a Muslim, ABC News one-upped Stoffel’s flagrantly counter-factual statement with the claim that “authorities in Canada are trying to understand what motivated a gunman to kill a soldier in the country’s capital Wednesday.”

In reality, what motivated him was blazingly obvious, but it was the one thing most Western government officials and all of the mainstream media have determined to ignore, and so the search was one for some other remotely plausible motive that could be sold to a public that is increasingly suspicious of what the government and media elites are telling them. Toronto’s Globe and Mail quoted a friend of Zehaf-Bibeau saying, “I think he must have been mentally ill,” although the only evidence for this that the paper presented was that “his friend frequently talked about the presence of Shaytan in the world – an Arabic term for devils and demons” – in other words, that Zehaf-Bibeau spoke frequently of what are standard beliefs of mainstream Islam.

Speaking of mental illness, in the wake of the Ottawa shootings, the police chiefs of Toronto and Ottawa wrote to local Muslim leaders, assuring them of their good will and urging Muslims to contact them in case of a “backlash.” These politically correct police chiefs seem to have imbibed the lesson well: after every jihad attack, Muslims are the victims, and need special reassurances. Of course, there should be no “backlash” against any innocent people and almost certainly won’t be, but this endless pandering is grotesque. Who is reassuring non-Muslims about keeping them safe from jihad attacks? Who is calling upon Muslim leaders in Canada or anywhere else to back up their condemnations of jihad terror with real action against it, including programs to teach young Muslims to reject that understanding of Islam?

No one. And that’s why Ahmad Rouleau and Michael Zehaf-Bibeau are likely to be only the first two in a long line of Muslims in Canada who heed the Islamic State’s call and murder their infidel countrymen. As long as politically correct fictions are allowed to befog the harsh realities of jihad, the bottom line is simple: more people are going to die.

« Last Edit: October 24, 2014, 06:56:19 AM by objectivist1 »

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Recently I saw a patient whose father was in the airforce in Iraq under Saddam. He fled Iraq many years ago. I asked her what she thought about what is going on in Iraq today. I stated how I feel sad for the many Iraqis who are perpetually stuck in the middle of all this warring.

Note: Part 1 includes our previously released 2-minute prologue/trailer.

Starting Nov. 4, federal prosecutors in Detroit present their case against a Palestinian woman who slipped through the cracks. Rasmieh Odeh, 67, has been in the United States since at least 1995.

To her advocates, she's a peaceful community activist living in Chicago and an asset to her community.

Yet, she has a bloody, dark side that she has kept hidden all these years.

Odeh is a convicted terrorist who spent 10 years in an Israeli prison. She led a 1969 bombing that killed two college students in a Jerusalem supermarket. Odeh confessed. She says that confession only came after she was tortured. She was sentenced to life in prison, but was released unexpectedly as part of a prisoner exchange in 1979. Her torture claim has never been substantiated—even by the United Nations, to which she reported the alleged torture after her release—and she has yet to deny her involvement in the murders or even her ultimate imprisonment.

Odeh could have discussed the particulars of her situation when she applied for her visa and citizenship—how her sentence was even commuted—if she felt her alleged torture merited special consideration. Instead, she simply told U.S. authorities she had a spotless record.

Prosecutors say that constitutes immigration fraud. A terrorist conviction for an attack causing two deaths is something immigration officials would want to consider before granting an immigrant a visa or welcoming her into American citizenship.

Still, her supporters have launched an aggressive campaign aimed at getting the fraud charges dropped. Odeh, they say, is the real victim here. They claim this case is really about a government conspiracy to attack Palestinian advocates in America.

The campaign is led by Odeh's colleagues from the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), but has attracted support from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, and even a group of 124 feminist academics.

In the video above, the first installment of a five-part Investigative Project on Terrorism video series on Odeh's case and the campaign to thwart it, we provide an overview of the case and a look at Rasmieh Odeh and those supporting her.

New installments will be released each day this week. Tomorrow we examine the 1969 Jerusalem bombing Odeh helped orchestrate and learn more about her victims.

“There’s a god of this world,” Bernard Hopkins was saying. “Some say the mass media is the god of this world. It’s like a song, like that ‘Happy.’ They shoved it down my throat. At first I hated it. Why I got to be happy? My dog died! But it ended up being one of my favorite songs. They put one of those songs out every 20 years. No matter how bad your life is, no matter how legitimate your reasons for being upset, they say, ‘Don’t worry, be happy.’ Song’s only three minutes, then you stop being happy. The way they control human beings, like cattle. How do a sheepdog keep 50 or 100 sheeps in order? I’m watching a dog keep a herd on TV, and I’m thinking that’s the way the system got most human beings: ‘Eat this. Drink that.’ ”

I had at some point asked him a question about boxing, but I hadn’t really expected a straight answer. Asking Hopkins a question is like trying to hit him. He won’t let you, but the experience of being frustrated by him can be instructive. Among other things, it can help you understand how Hopkins, the oldest champion in the history of boxing, continues to hang onto the title, his money and his considerable wits at the age of — this is not a typo — 49. Hopkins currently holds two of the four major light-heavyweight belts and will try to further unify the division’s fragmented title on Nov. 8, when he faces Sergey (Krusher) Kovalev, the unbeaten Russian knockout machine who holds one of the other two belts and who, though relatively untested, is widely considered one of the deadliest seek-and-destroy punchers of any size.

Unlike most other boxers, who train down to their fighting weight only when they have a bout coming up, Hopkins keeps himself right around the 175-pound light-heavyweight limit. Fight people marvel at the ascetic rigor that has kept him perpetually in superb shape for almost three decades, his habit of returning to the gym first thing Monday morning after a Saturday-night fight, the list of pleasurable things he won’t eat, drink or do. But to fetishize the no-nonsense perfection of his body, which displays none of the extraneous defined muscular bulk that impresses fans but doesn’t help win fights, is to miss what makes Hopkins an exemplar of sustaining and extending powers that are supposed to be in natural decline. He has no peer in the ability to strategize both the round-by-round conduct of a fight and also the shifts and adjustments entailed by an astonishingly long career in the hurt business. He has kept his body supple and fit enough to obey his fighting mind, but it’s the continuing suppleness of that mind, as he strategizes, that has always constituted his principal advantage.

Opponents don’t worry about facing his speed or power. They fear what’s going on in his head.

On a hot summer afternoon, Hopkins was having his hands wrapped in preparation for a workout at Joe Hand Boxing Gym in North Philadelphia. I had asked if he ever felt tempted to dumb down his subtle and hyperefficient boxing style — if he ever throws more punches than his exquisite ring sense tells him is necessary to win a round (which would increase the risk of being hit in return), for the benefit of ringside judges unequipped to appreciate his nuances.

“I understand and I don’t understand human beings,” Hopkins began, warming up for the filibuster to come. “In life — I’m gonna give you life and also sport, intertwined — in life, when you start being conscious of what people are thinking or judging, you’re in trouble.” From there, he took off on his disquisition on the hegemonic power of mass media. It’s one of his favorite subjects, and also, he didn’t want to talk about judges, in keeping with his disinclination to discuss any topic related to fighting or training that might give even the slightest advantage to the large subset of the human race he regards as potential enemies. From “Happy” and sheepdogs he segued into a critique of the prison-industrial complex, another frequently recurring subject for Hopkins, who learned to box in his early 20s while serving five years at Graterford Prison, outside his native Philadelphia, for assorted felonies. “It’s privatized,” he said. “You can buy stock in prison! That means, when I do something” — illegal, he meant, that leads to imprisonment — “you can buy stock in me.” He’s not shy about pointing out that both private and public interests invest heavily in the social failure of black men. All the more satisfying, then, to have beaten the odds: “But I flipped the script on the norm.”

Hopkins is sure that “the shot-callers and string-pullers” yearn for his comeuppance. They and their pawns are always after him to quit, he said. " ‘You got enough money.’ Now they counting my money! ‘We don’t want to see you get hurt.’ Where were they when I was walking off nine?” — a reference to the nine years he spent on parole following his release from prison in 1988, a period of self-reform and toeing the line that he considers the hardest thing he ever did. It’s part of a litany of young troubles and redemptive turns, a personal Stations of the Cross composed of vividly emblematic scenes from a life story that begins in the Raymond Rosen projects in North Philly and eventually arrives at the big home in suburban Delaware where he now lives. Along the way came three stab wounds collected before age 14, a prolific career as a violent street criminal culminating at 17 in an 18-year prison sentence, jailhouse rapes and a murder he witnessed, the shooting death of his brother Michael, a Quran given to him by a fellow inmate that reawakened his faith, the bracing plunge via Graterford’s boxing program into the icy clarity of the gym and the ring, the warden who supposedly said, “You’ll be back,” when Hopkins was paroled.

Opponents don’t worry about facing his speed or power. They fear what’s going on in his head.

Hopkins began playacting a scenario in which They look for a weakness with which to bring him down. " ‘We gotta discredit him. Do he drink? He don’t drink. Do he run with whores? He don’t. He lives clean. He don’t party. He don’t use drugs. Who cooks his food? He cook his own food. He stands in line at Whole Foods with everybody else.’ So they try to find guys to beat me, and I beat them, and I get rich. They become part of my discipline.” Then he was off on another of his regular topics: the conspiratorial failure of Whole Foods, Nike and other corporations to make a “poster boy” of him, a bad boy who became a good citizen and the most potently healthy-living middle-aged man imaginable. How come the marketers, who ate up George Foreman’s fuzzy-bunny routine and Lance Armstrong’s lies, aren’t lining up to pay for the celebrity-pitchman services of an outspoken Sunni ex-con who abjures alcohol, caffeine, refined sugar, processed grains, tap water, performance-enhancing drugs, weakness and just about everything else other than winning fights and making money? This grievance is part of the eternal drama of Bernard Hopkins, a renewable energy source that helps keep him going strong in and out of the ring.

Continue reading the main storyHopkins climbed through the ropes and onto the canvas, stretched and shadowboxed for a while, and then spent a few rounds working on the mechanics of not being hit. A burly young man named Bear came after him with a blue foam wand in either hand, trying to tap him with simulated punches. Hopkins timed Bear’s advances, shifting the range between them to forestall blows, then stepped in close to put his shoulder on the bigger man, driving him back by expertly shifting his own weight. When Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” came on the gym’s sound system midround, Hopkins gave me a significant look over Bear’s shoulder: They never rest.

There are masters of defense who rely on will-o-the-wisp elusiveness, making a spectacle of ducking punches. Others build a fortress with their gloves, arms and lead shoulder, deflecting incoming blows. Hopkins can slip and block punches with the best of them, but his defensive technique is founded on undoing the other man’s leverage by making constant small adjustments in spacing and timing that anticipate and neutralize attacks before they begin. It’s somehow never quite the right moment to hit Hopkins with a meaningful shot. Boxers, especially big hitters, feel a kind of click when the necessary elements — range, balance, timing, angle — line up to create an opening to throw a hard punch with proper form. Hopkins doesn’t run away, but an opponent can go for long stretches of a round without ever feeling that click.

Frank Lotierzo, a former boxer from Philadelphia who is one of the fight press’s best analysts of ring style, broke down some of Hopkins’s defensive habits for me: “You’ll notice he’s looking down a lot, watching the other guy’s front foot to see when it comes up, which it does when you step into a punch, and that’s when he makes his move. He ties up opponents’ elbows on the inside; you control the elbows, you control the arms. He never backs straight up; he’ll give you an angle every time. He will pick a side and go away from your power, isolate one side of your body, step over and fight you on your blind side.” Drawing from that repertory, Hopkins went around and around with Bear in a state of tautly maintained détente, discouraging wand-blows but not throwing any punches himself.

Naazim Richardson, Hopkins’s trainer (and Bear’s father), took over for a while, wearing a glove on one hand and a pad on the other to catch punches. A steady skullcapped presence in Hopkins’s corner, Brother Naazim, as he’s known, is more co-conspirator than mentor. At this point, Hopkins, who received advanced instruction in his craft from English (Bouie) Fisher, George Benton and other wise men of Philadelphia’s deep ring tradition, knows more about boxing than most trainers. Hopkins and the much larger Brother Naazim shoved and hauled in a series of messy tussles from which Hopkins would emerge to bang the pad with a clean shot or two. Hitting the pads, intended to ingrain accuracy and speed and precise punching form, has become for most boxers in training a largely empty exercise in self-affirmation. The trainer holds up the pads, and the fighter pop-pop-pops them with blisteringly impressive combinations in predictable rhythm, combinations that he’s unlikely to throw in the give and take of a real fight. But Hopkins was rehearsing a more realistic struggle in which he would spend a lot of time shifting and mauling to denature an opponent’s leverage, looking to create an opening in which to score with a sneaky inside shot.

Figuring out what the other guy wants to do and not letting him do it is a matter of policy for Hopkins. But it’s also an expression of his inmost character and worldview. He’s not so much a contrarian as a serial agonist who regards life as an unending train of struggles for the upper hand, and over the years he has come around to the premise that such a life is best lived through a relentlessly calculated managing of self rather than the self-destructive fury of all-out aggression. One key to his longevity at the top of the fight world is that he has come to consider it “barbaric” to exchange blows with an opponent. Hopkins, who listens to Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” while he does roadwork, will employ any tactic at his disposal, fair or foul, to frustrate an adversary — fighter, manager, promoter, TV executive, conversational foil — while he applies his strategic acumen to the problem of divining that adversary’s deepest intention and coming up with a scheme to nullify it while absorbing the absolute minimum of punishment.

After Hopkins’s record-setting reign as middleweight champion from 1995 to 2005, it was widely assumed that he would retire and duly enter the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Instead, he retooled his body to move up two weight classes, straight to 175 pounds from 160 without pausing at 168 (super middleweight), an unheard-of leap in the modern era, and thrashed the light-heavyweight champion, Antonio Tarver, who was heavily favored to beat him. In middle age, Hopkins has made a specialty of flummoxing and defeating younger men who were supposed to have too much power for him: Tarver, Felix Trinidad, Kelly Pavlik, Tavoris Cloud, Jean Pascal.

Hopkins, who used to be known as the Executioner but now styles himself as the Alien, has a record of 55-6 with 2 draws; he will turn 50 in January. Imagine, if you’re looking for parallels in other sports, that the linebacker Ray Lewis did not retire at 36 last year and was still playing in the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl in 2026; or that Derek Jeter, who was 14 when Hopkins had his first professional fight, decided to play on past 40 and was still making the All-Star game and the playoffs in 2023. But getting old in the ring is a far more brutal and unforgiving process than getting old on any playing field. Winning title fights is the highly visible part of a much larger spectrum of effort that includes giving and taking countless blows, weathering the grind of making weight, training more consistently and shrewdly than anyone else, guiding his own boxing and other business affairs, preserving the integrity of his fortune and brain function and priming his seemingly inexhaustible motivational engine. Even great boxers tend over the long haul to lose the desire to do what it takes to win fights, but Hopkins’s sense of purpose, like his fighting mind, shows no signs of flagging. If anything, it’s getting sharper and stronger.

“To me, Bernard, he ain’t no real gifted athlete,” says Robert Allen, a former middleweight contender who was in his early 30s and already in decline when Hopkins (who is four years older than Allen) beat him in 1999 and 2004. “He’s just a little of everything on the average: average punching power, average hand speed.” Measured by the absurdly high standards of elite fighters, Hopkins’s only outstanding physical attribute is his “chin” — the ability to take a punch — which has less to do with natural gifts than with conditioning, technique, experience and will. Hopkins’s “ring generalship” is what sets him apart, Allen says. “The ring is like his home. It’s like he’s sittin’ on the couch watchin’ TV, relaxing. He’s like a snake, not even breathin’.” In 2011, Allen said of Hopkins: “He’s not really a fighter. It’s like something more political when you get in there with him.”

Continue reading the main storyHopkins has changed his style over time to accommodate advancing age, moving the emphasis to efficiency over action. A mature-period Hopkins fight goes the distance — he has never been knocked out, and he hasn’t knocked out an opponent since Oscar De La Hoya, 10 years ago — and considering they’re boxing matches, they don’t have that much hitting in them. His objective is to prevent the other man from doing much of anything at all so that Hopkins can win rounds with a few well-considered blows. Sometimes he shaves his margin of victory too fine, or the other man is just a little too active and strong, and Hopkins loses a close decision, but nobody ever gives him a beating. Louts who lust for blood may boo when Hopkins works his punch-expunging magic, but Sun Tzu, who taught that a wise general wins by attacking his opponent’s strategy rather than by risking the contingencies of pitched battle, would approve.‘The ring is like his home,’ says a former opponent. ‘It’s like he’s sittin’ on the couch watchin’ TV, relaxing. He’s like a snake, not even breathin’.’

Hopkins’s former opponents describe fighting him as an ordeal and an education. First come the prefight head games. “He touched me, pushed me in my face at the weigh-in, and it worked,” Winky Wright told me. “It made me want to hurt him and knock him out, instead of outbox him.” Once in the ring, “he won’t allow you to do what you want to do,” as Allen put it; I heard versions of that phrase over and over from men who fought Hopkins. And when an opponent does sense an opening, that could well be a trap. “He’s always five steps ahead of you,” De La Hoya told me. Hopkins set him up for the diaphragm-paralyzing left hook to the body that ended their fight by letting De La Hoya delude himself into believing that he was coming on strong. “He let me throw some punches for a couple of rounds, let my confidence build up,” De La Hoya said. “I got a little too confident, let my guard down, and that’s when he hurt me with a punch I didn’t see.” Smiling ruefully, he added, “I really thought I was going to win the fight!”

A skilled fouler, Hopkins will also hold-and-hit, punch low, step on an opponent’s instep and follow through with his own smooth-shaved skull after a punch to initiate a clash of heads. And he shamelessly complains about the dastardly things supposedly being done to him by the other guy. “When he bent over like I’d hit him low, he looked so wronged,” said the former super-middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe, laughing. “But he was just buying some time.”

Hopkins has hung around in boxing long enough to profit from the passage of time. (The same goes for his extensive real estate holdings in once-depressed and now-gentrifying neighborhoods in Philadelphia.) Sixty or 80 years ago, when the sport was more popular and more deeply embedded in day-to-day life in industrial America, there were several fighters in every weight class who knew all the little things that together add up to Hopkins’s big edge in the ring. But no longer. Hopkins is an enduring atavism, a one-man history lesson in the boxer’s craft.

The men he has fought, even much younger ones, have slipped away into retirement in his wake. The will to fight diminishes, and the once-peerlessly toned body follows. “Oh, man, I’m done,” Kelly Pavlik said when I asked him if Hopkins’s longevity gave him ideas about a comeback. De la Hoya said, “More power to him, but I’m done.” Winky Wright said: “I’m done. I play a lot of golf. It’s easier.”

Hopkins makes a habit of putting his hands on potential opponents to size them up, assessing their strength and feeling for weakness. In July, I watched him do roughly the same thing to a Showtime producer. Hopkins made a joke about being camera-shy — he’s not — just so he could laugh and slap the man’s shoulder, run a hand along his ribs, get a feel for whom he was dealing with. This habit can turn sitting and talking with him into a contact sport. He scoots his chair up to yours and bumps your knee with his own, as if striving for position. Leaning in so close that you can feel his hot breath on your face, he pokes and prods a shoulder, a forearm, jabs stiffened fingers into your torso just a little too hard, nominally to illustrate a point he’s making about digestion or human frailty or whatever. When I asked him about it, he said: “Feeling for softness is important to my diagnosis. Sometimes you can see and look, but you gotta feel to really check.”

Continue reading the main story‘If you don’t know your own value, somebody will tell you your value, and it’ll be less than you’re worth.’

​At the time we were sitting face to face on folding chairs in the media room of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Hopkins, a minority partner in Golden Boy Promotions, Oscar De La Hoya’s company, which he joined a couple of months after he knocked out De La Hoya in 2004, was in town to boost a fight promoted by Golden Boy. But we were talking instead about how he learned the business side of boxing. This part of his story is essential to understanding his longevity because it’s about rigorous self-knowledge. A great strategist knows his enemy, Sun Tzu says, but he also knows himself. Hopkins performed his own diagnostic routine on himself as a young felon and didn’t like the resulting self-portrait — that of a doom-seeking knucklehead — and so he found the discipline in boxing to go straight and make good. He examined himself again as a rising middleweight in his late 20s and, again, didn’t like what he found: a patsy who dutifully did all the hard work at the behest of others who took more than their share of the money.

So, armed only with native smarts and a jailhouse G.E.D., Hopkins set out to turn a weakness into strength. “I started asking questions, trying to figure out how everybody else was making more than me, and I’m taking the punches,” he said. “I had to learn the business — international rights, marketing, license fees, the gate, concessions, merchandising, sponsors.” He did it on the sly at first. “I didn’t want to let people know I was trying to learn, or they would have tried to stop me, so I would ask questions about other fighters who set an example for me not to do.”

By 1995 he felt ready to take over his own boxing affairs, and he has managed himself ever since, employing lawyers and other “soldiers who do the legal mumbo jumbo” to help negotiate deals that allow him to take home a much greater share of the money he makes in the ring. “I started getting mines late in the game, once I realized I should know this before I became another [expletive]-up fighter,” he said. “If you don’t know your own value, somebody will tell you your value, and it’ll be less than you’re worth.”

Hopkins, who has put his ring earnings into a conservative business portfolio strong on real estate and bonds, resolved long ago not to end up punchy and cadging for handouts, as so many former fighters have. In addition to looking out for himself, he has a wife, Jeanette, and three children to provide for. He offers advice to younger fighters, like the undefeated super middleweight Andre Ward, who told me: “He’s always hammering home: ‘Nobody gets paid unless you get in the ring. So get what you’ve got coming, and save your money. Everybody likes nice things, but wait.’ ”

When I asked Hopkins about advising other fighters, he said, “I was perceived as a troublemaker” when he began managing himself, “because I was a slave who learned to read. Maybe I’m more of a troublemaker now — somebody trying to stand up for themselves and maybe influence others, teach the other slaves how to read.”

Bernard Hopkins may well be the best old fighter ever. Sugar Ray Robinson and Muhammad Ali, whose names come up often in discussions of the greatest fighters of all time, were both over the hill by their late 30s. Even among the few greats who fought into their 40s — Bob Fitzsimmons, Archie Moore, George Foreman — it’s difficult to find parallels to Hopkins’s late-career run of lucrative high-profile victories over top-flight competition. Others who fought into middle age have typically ended up taking a pounding that made them look pathetic, but Hopkins gets hit less than ever these days, and his post-40-year-old losses have been by debatable decision. And of course, Hopkins and his few near-peers in long-term success are all exceptions to the fight world’s Hobbesian norm of short primes followed by brutal declines. Consider Mike Tyson, who is a year younger than Hopkins. Tyson peaked in 1990 at 24, and was effectively finished as a serious fighter by 1997.

Hopkins may be richer, more sophisticated, more patient and (according to those who work with him) mellower and less abrasively paranoid than he used to be, but he’s constitutionally unequipped to grow overcomfortable in success. When I asked if he had been concerned, back when he started managing himself, that he might be blacklisted by the powers that be, he said, “I feel like I was blacklisted in 1965” — at birth. “I don’t get blinded by a few successful peoples, like Jay-Z or Oprah. I look at the people who didn’t make it — the penitentiaries, the thousands.” A handful of champions make serious money, but boxing remains fundamentally a sport for those who, like Hopkins as a young man, feel they have nothing to lose. While he had to outgrow that earlier version of himself in order to survive and prosper, he hasn’t lost touch with it. He used a mug shot of him taken in 1984 as wallpaper for his phone. He looks older in it than he does now, he says.

I asked, “Are we talking about the motor that makes you go?” and he wrong-footed me by coming back with a straight answer. “Yes,” he said. “Being the person I became, this is the person I am.”

Carlo Rotella is director of American studies at Boston College and the author, most recently, of “Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles and Other True Stories.”